Hi Wil540 art. Thank you for your work on Saratoga Water. Another editor, SunDawn, has reviewed it as part of new pages patrol and left the following comment:
Thank you for creating the article! May you have a blessed day today!
To reply, leave a comment here and begin it with {{Re|SunDawn}}. (Message delivered via the Page Curation tool, on behalf of the reviewer.)
The special focus this year will be the launch of our "400 Neighborhoods" campaign for the city's 400th anniversary and WikiProject New York City/400 Task Force.
We'll also have a lightning talks session and you're invited to sign up for one, though space is somewhat limited.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-01-06. Missed the previous one? See issue #660
Discussions
New request for comments: Constraints for Germanies - Following from a property discussion on P17 (German non-states), this RfC aims to find consensus on how to apply constraints that exclude items of historical periods in German history.
Please submit your proposals for the Data Reuse Days online event until January 12th. See current proposals on the talk page and here's some ideas to inspire you: presentations/demos of tools using Wikidata's data (10mins Lightning Talk presentations), discussions and presentations connecting Wikidata editors with reusers and/or explanations and demos on how to use a specific part of the technical infrastructure to reuse Wikidata's data (APIs, dumps, etc.).
Talk to the Search Platform / Query Service Team --January 8, 2025. The Search Platform Team holds monthly meetings to discuss anything related to Wikimedia search, Wikidata Query Service (WDQS), Wikimedia Commons Query Service (WCQS), etc.! Time: 16:00-17:00 UTC / 08:00 PDT / 11:00 EDT / 17:00 CET
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 17:00 UTC, 15th January 2025 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Blogs: (fr) female authors with male pseudonyms, blog post by Le Deuxième Texte including SPARQL queries to find female authors with male pseudonyms.
Websites :Global Dementia and Risk Factors, website by 'Students at the Maastricht Science Programme', includes data visualizations of the prevalence and current treatments of dementia across the world. It utilises data extracted as SPARQL Endpoints from Wikidata.
Papers
Ontology-grounded Automatic Knowledge Graph Construction by LLM under Wikidata schema - This paper proposes an ontology-driven approach to KG construction using LLMs where competency questions guide ontology creation and relation extraction, leveraging Wikidata for semantic consistency. A scalable pipeline minimizes human effort while producing high-quality, interpretable KGs interoperable with Wikidata for knowledge base expansion. By Xiaohan Feng, Xixin Wu & Helen Meng (2024).
Knowledge Incorporated Image Question Answering Using Wikidata Repository - Proposes a Visual Question Answering (VQA) model that integrates external knowledge from Wikidata to address complex open-domain questions by combining image, question, and knowledge modalities. Evaluated on the VQAv2 dataset, the model outperforms prior state-of-the-art approaches, demonstrating improved reasoning and accuracy (Koshti et al., 2024).
Videos: (arabic) Part 6: SPARQL Demo Session: connecting external services - Sparql SERVICE clause gives access to additional data such as labels via wikibase:label, interaction with MediaWiki APIs using wikibase:mwapi, and integration of data from subgraphs (such as the main graph and the scholarly articles graph). Integration of data from external SPARQL endpoints such as DBpedia.
Tool of the week
Wikidata Entity Linker - is a Microsoft Edge browser extension that creates web links for matching inner HTML text based on a regex format of Q\d+ which is the format of a Wikidata Entity ID. (email)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Vacancy: Research Software Engineer / Wikibase-Expert - The Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) located in Hannover has a research position open for someone interested in the deployment, administration and maintenance of open source knowledge management software such as Mediawiki, Wikibase and OpenRefine as part of the NFDI4Culture partnership within the OSL.
January 1, 2025, marked Public Domain Day, with hundreds of 1929 films entering the public domain. Sandra has shared helpful notes to assist in making these films discoverable via WikiFlix, by adding video files to Wikicommons and Wikidata. Join the effort!
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
About box (Screenshot of the About Box of the respective software (contains important information such as authors, license, version number and year(s) and is included in almost every software))
nonprofit tax status (country specific tax status of organisations like non-profits)
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 17:00 UTC, 15th January 2025 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Join the Wikidata Training Event 2025 organised by Wikimedia Botswana UG for Wikidata enthusiasts of all levels. Starts 18 Jan 10:00am CAT (UTC+2), registration required.
Wikidata module for the Hidden Figures CURE - The newly published Wikidata module for the Hidden Figures CURE teaches undergraduates to use Wikidata for uncovering and highlighting the contributions of hidden figures in natural history, such as women, people of color, and Indigenous peoples.
Memory of the World: Ways forward - Efforts to improve the representation of UNESCO's Memory of the World (MOW) international register on Wikidata include new articles, enhanced data quality, and training on creating structured data. Key contributions involve updating Wikipedia and Wikidata entries, addressing data inconsistencies, and expanding the visibility of MOW inscriptions across languages.
Public domain visibility on Wikidata (in Catalan). The article discusses how Wikidata is being used to enhance the visibility of public domain works by integrating copyright information and making it easily accessible.
Presentations: Wikibase e Wikidata per lo studio dell'epigrafia greca (in Italian, i.e. Wikibase and Wikidata for the study of Greek epigraphy), presentation at SAEG (Advanced Seminar of Greek Epigraphy) IX in Rome, 10 January 2025, by Pietro Ortimini, Anna Clara Maniero Azzolini, Epìdosis - slides
Tool of the week
Dungeon Of Knowledge - is a roguelike game with Items generated from Wikidata that lets you crawl through the Dungeon of Knowledge in a classic ASCII interface. (toot) (blog)
VIAF (cf. Q54919 and P214) underwent a relevant change of interface on January 10; the way of visualizing clusters in JSON format has changed in comparison with present OCLC documentation and e.g. http://viaf.org/viaf/102333412/viaf.json doesn't work anymore; this broke most or all Wikidata gadgets using VIAF data; in the absence of official communications from OCLC, developers are trying to understand if the new VIAF interface is stable before changing their gadgets accordingly
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
About box (Screenshot of the About Box of the respective software (contains important information such as authors, license, version number and year(s) and is included in almost every software))
nomenclatural type of (taxon item of which this item is the taxonomic type (name-bearing type), e.g. the family for which this genus is the type, the genus for which this species is the type, the taxon for which this type specimen is the type, ect...)
World Heritage type (Propriety of World heritage site : the Type (Cultural, Natural, Mixed))
Entry height (Height of the entrance above ground level for boarding public transport vehicles.)
location code (the location code of the location item. Should be used with qualifier property {{Q|P459}} to specify which location code system being used.)
DIF historia player ID (Identifier for a sportsperson connected to Djurgårdens IF on difhistoria.se (official site))
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
The Single User Login system is being updated over the next few months. This is the system which allows users to fill out the login form on one Wikimedia site and get logged in on all others at the same time. It needs to be updated because of the ways that browsers are increasingly restricting cross-domain cookies. To accommodate these restrictions, login and account creation pages will move to a central domain, but it will still appear to the user as if they are on the originating wiki. The updated code will be enabled this week for users on test wikis. This change is planned to roll out to all users during February and March. See the SUL3 project page for more details and a timeline.
Updates for editors
On wikis with PageAssessments installed, you can now filter search results to pages in a given WikiProject by using the inproject: keyword. (These wikis: Arabic Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage, French Wikipedia, Hungarian Wikipedia, Nepali Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia) [1]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Tigre (w:tig:) [2]
View all 35 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a bug with updating a user's edit-count after making a rollback edit, which is now fixed. [3]
Updates for technical contributors
Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. Starting the week of January 13, we will begin rerouting some page content endpoints from RESTbase to the newer MediaWiki REST API endpoints for all wiki projects. This change was previously available on testwiki and should not affect existing functionality, but active users of the impacted endpoints may raise issues directly to the MediaWiki Interfaces Team in Phabricator if they arise.
Toolforge tool maintainers can now share their feedback on Toolforge UI, an initiative to provide a web platform that allows creating and managing Toolforge tools through a graphic interface, in addition to existing command-line workflows. This project aims to streamline active maintainers’ tasks, as well as make registration and deployment processes more accessible for new tool creators. The initiative is still at a very early stage, and the Cloud Services team is in the process of collecting feedback from the Toolforge community to help shape the solution to their needs. Read more and share your thoughts about Toolforge UI.
For tool and library developers who use the OAuth system: The identity endpoint used for OAuth 1 and OAuth 2 returned a JSON object with an integer in its sub field, which was incorrect (the field must always be a string). This has been fixed; the fix will be deployed to Wikimedia wikis on the week of January 13. [4]
Many wikis currently use Cite CSS to render custom footnote markers in Parsoid output. Starting January 20 these rules will be disabled, but the developers ask you to not clean up your MediaWiki:Common.css until February 20 to avoid issues during the migration. Your wikis might experience some small changes to footnote markers in Visual Editor and when using experimental Parsoid read mode, but if there are changes these are expected to bring the rendering in line with the legacy parser output. [5]
Public Domain Day 2025, Women in Red hits 20% biography milestone, Spanish Wikipedia reaches two million articles, and other news from the Wikimedia world.
Edit-A-Thon for Black History Month: 12 February 1300 - 1500 MST (UTC+7) is an onsite event at the University of Colorado Boulder, with a theme to add or expand items on Black and African-American comics creators.
Data Reuse Days 2025 is from February 18 to 27, 2025! This is an online event focusing on how people and organizations use Wikidata's data to build interesting applications and tools. Don't forget to register so we can know you are coming.
Past: Missed the Q1 Wikidata+Wikibase office hour? You can catch up by reading the session log here: 2025-01-15 (Q1 2025)
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Blogs: Cleaning up legacy Wikipedia links in Open Library: The blog post discusses cleaning up outdated Wikipedia links to improve article accuracy and navigation, while highlighting the importance of integrating Wikidata for better data management.
Tracking Looted Art with Wikidata Queries - As part of Art History Loves Wiki 25, Laurel Zuckerman will show how Wikidata SPARQL queries can aid provenance researchers and historians find, identify and track looted art.
OpenStreetMap and Wikidata in Disaster Times: Ormat Murat Yilmaz will speak on how Wikidata and OSM play a role in coordinating relief efforts by providing a collaborative platform for providing data about affected areas. Part of WM CEE meeting 2024 Istanbul.
Serbian Novels on Wikidata: Presented by Filip Maljkovič on the progress and process of adding Serbian literature into Wikidata, using OCR methods to map pages and assign Properties.
(german)Wikidata for NGOs: Use and network open data sensibly: Johan Hoelderle discusses how nonprofits can benefit from the largest free knowledge base and show what potential open data offers for non-profit projects.
Data partnerships and Libraries combating misinformation: WMDE's Alan Ang delivers a speech on how GLAM institutions can help prevent the spread of dis- and misinformation whether hallucinatory AI or malicious, part of the Wikimedia+Libraries International Convention 2025.
Product Manager: Wikibase Suite: Wikimedia Deutschland is looking for a PM to lead Wikibase Suite, empowering institutions like GLAMs and research groups to build customizable linked knowledge bases and contribute to the world’s largest open data graph.
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
About box (Screenshot of the About Box of the respective software (contains important information such as authors, license, version number and year(s) and is included in almost every software))
nomenclatural type of (taxon item of which this item is the taxonomic type (name-bearing type), e.g. the family for which this genus is the type, the genus for which this species is the type, the taxon for which this type specimen is the type, ect...)
World Heritage type (Propriety of World heritage site : the Type (Cultural, Natural, Mixed))
location code (the location code of the location item. Should be used with qualifier property {{Q|P459}} to specify which location code system being used.)
DIF historia player ID (Identifier for a sportsperson connected to Djurgårdens IF on difhistoria.se (official site))
We’re making good progress on checking format constraints more efficiently and with fewer errors (T380751)
We’re working on making distinct-values constraint checks works with the split Query Service (T369079)
EntitySchemas: We’re working on making the heading on EntitySchema pages apply language fallback (T228423)
Search: We’ve started working on the new search UI component which will let you search for additional entity types from the main search bar and not just Items anymore (T338483)
Wikibase REST API: We're working on adding search to the API (T383209)
In response to the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, WikiLA has organized three edit-a-thons to create or improve articles about the historically, culturally, and/or architecturally significant structures that were destroyed or damaged during the fires, and the organizations and entities that stepped up to help. Please join us.
Sunday, January 26, at the Ebell of Los Angeles in mid-Wilshire from 11:00–4:00. (Details and sign up here.)
Sunday, January 26, at the Live Oak Library in Arcadia from 11:00–4:00. (Details and sign up here.)
Sunday, February 2, at the Hammer Museum in Westwood from 11:00–4:00. (Details and sign up here.)
To opt out of future mailings about LA meetups, please remove your name from this list.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Administrators can mass-delete multiple pages created by a user or IP address using Extension:Nuke. It previously only allowed deletion of pages created in the last 30 days. It can now delete pages from the last 90 days, provided it is targeting a specific user or IP address. [6]
On wikis that use the Patrolled edits feature, when the rollback feature is used to revert an unpatrolled page revision, that revision will now be marked as "manually patrolled" instead of "autopatrolled", which is more accurate. Some editors that use filters on Recent Changes may need to update their filter settings. [7]
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the Visual Editor's "Insert link" feature did not always suggest existing pages properly when an editor started typing, which has now been fixed.
Updates for technical contributors
The Structured Discussion extension (also known as Flow) is being progressively removed from the wikis. This extension is unmaintained and causes issues. It will be replaced by DiscussionTools, which is used on any regular talk page. The last group of wikis (Catalan Wikiquote, Wikimedia Finland, Goan Konkani Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikibooks, Wikimedia Sweden) will soon be contacted. If you have questions about this process, please ping Trizek (WMF) at your wiki. [8]
The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: updates about services from the Data Platform Engineering teams, information about Codex from the Design System team, and more.
Call for Proposals: IslandoraCon 2025. "IslandoraCon brings together a community of librarians, archivists, cultural heritage collections managers, technologists, developers, project managers, and open source project enthusiasts in support of the Islandora framework for digital curation and asset management." Deadline for session proposals: February 14, 2024.
PhotoNearby.js - a user script that checks Wikimedia Commons for a nearby photo if no image (P18) statement and has coordinate location (P625). Displays above the Statements heading. Defaults to a 500 meter radius. Displays a link to WikiShootMe.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
As part of an effort to benchmark open source SPARQL engines on Wikidata, the page Wikidata:Scaling Wikidata/Benchmarking/Existing Benchmarks contains some initial results and analyses of benchmarking Blazegraph, MilleniumDB, QLever, and Virtuoso on several existing SPARQL query benchmarks for Wikidata. There are some surprising results there, particularly related to different answers produced by different engines. Suggestions on how to improve the effort or provide deeper explanations of the results are particularly welcome on the discussion page.
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
nomenclatural type of (taxon item of which this item is the taxonomic type (name-bearing type), e.g. the family for which this genus is the type, the genus for which this species is the type, the taxon for which this type specimen is the type, ect...)
World Heritage type (Propriety of World heritage site : the Type (Cultural, Natural, Mixed))
location code (the location code of the location item. Should be used with qualifier property {{Q|P459}} to specify which location code system being used.)
DIF historia player ID (Identifier for a sportsperson connected to Djurgårdens IF on difhistoria.se (official site))
Newest WikiProjects: No Longer at the Margins - aims to highlight and document the contributions of women in science, ensuring their visibility and recognition in the historical and archival record by addressing biases and gaps in representation.
Storage growth: We are making some changes to the terms-related database table in order to scale better (phab:T351802)
Constraint violations: We’re working on making distinct-values constraint checks works with the split Query Service (phab:T369079)
EntitySchemas: We’re working on making the heading on EntitySchema pages apply language fallback (phab:T228423)
Search: We are working on the new search UI component which will let you search for additional entity types from the main search bar and not just Items anymore (phab:T338483)
Wikibase REST API: We're continuing the work on adding search to the API (phab:T383209)
Lua: We are investigating if we can increase the Entity Usage Limit on client pages (phab:T381098)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
Patrollers and admins - what information or context about edits or users could help you to make patroller or admin decisions more quickly or easily? The Wikimedia Foundation wants to hear from you to help guide its upcoming annual plan. Please consider sharing your thoughts on this and 13 other questions to shape the technical direction for next year.
Updates for editors
iOS Wikipedia App users worldwide can now access a personalized Year in Review feature, which provides insights based on their reading and editing history on Wikipedia. This project is part of a broader effort to help welcome new readers as they discover and interact with encyclopedic content.
Edit patrollers now have a new feature available that can highlight potentially problematic new pages. When a page is created with the same title as a page which was previously deleted, a tag ('Recreated') will now be added, which users can filter for in Special:RecentChanges and Special:NewPages. [9]
Later this week, there will be a new warning for editors if they attempt to create a redirect that links to another redirect (a double redirect). The feature will recommend that they link directly to the second redirect's target page. Thanks to the user SomeRandomDeveloper for this improvement. [10]
Wikimedia wikis allow WebAuthn-based second factor checks (such as hardware tokens) during login, but the feature is fragile and has very few users. The MediaWiki Platform team is temporarily disabling adding new WebAuthn keys, to avoid interfering with the rollout of SUL3 (single user login version 3). Existing keys are unaffected. [11]
For developers that use the MediaWiki History dumps: The Data Platform Engineering team has added a couple of new fields to these dumps, to support the Temporary Accounts initiative. If you maintain software that reads those dumps, please review your code and the updated documentation, since the order of the fields in the row will change. There will also be one field rename: in the mediawiki_user_history dump, the anonymous field will be renamed to is_anonymous. The changes will take effect with the next release of the dumps in February. [12]
Hello! This is an announcement that The Downlink has been revived. Rather than simply start again, I have chosen to create two special issues recapping the past three years. The first special issue spans November 2021 to December 2023, while the second special issue spans January 2024 to December 2024.
Due to the size of these pages, as well as the fact that they are non-standard issues, I have instead had this notice sent out. The following issues of volume 3 (Jan - Dec 2025) should be significantly smaller.
Please be aware that, for a variety of reasons, the issues that I create may be published late.
We are excited to reveal WikidataCon 2025 will be returning this year, keep an eye on the project page for more details to come, and block your calendar for October 31 - November 2.
New Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group project series! The next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group project series session on Tuesday, 4 February, 2025 at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET Time Zone Converter Eric Willey will be facilitating a series of four sessions focused on starting a Wikidata project from the foundation up at your institution. The first session will focus on selling your project to administrators.
Wikidata Indonesia is holding a Datathon (February 5 - 7) and Quiz (January 31 - February 7), take part!
Data Reuse Days, February 18-27: online event dedicated to the applications using Wikidata's data and their technical setup. A first version of the program is now available. Make sure to register to receive the event's access links.
Why Wikidata? and edit-a-thon hosted by Illinois State University on February 4, 1400 - 1600 CST (UTC-6). Eric Willey and Rebecca Fitzsimmons will hold a hands-on demonstration of Wikidata, at the Milner Library, ISU (Room 165).
Past Events
Wikidata Workshop Jan 2025 - Hosted by Wikimedia Canada, this workshop offered 2 sessions for English and French-speaking attendees. Subjects covered include the basics of Wikidata, intro to editing, linking photos to Commons and how to query Wikidata. The workshop took place 30 January 01:00 - 03:00 UTC.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Blogs
Bob duCharme, author of Learning SPARQL posts a blog entry on filtering (only) foreign labels from a SPARQL query, using the WDQS to illustrate their example.
Towards a Sustainable Community-Driven Documentation of Semantic Web Tools A Wikidata-based toolkit to help knowledge engineers and developers find and document semantic web tools by categorizing them into a taxonomy and integrating GitHub metadata to track their maintenance status. By A. Reiz, F.J. Ekaputra & N. Mihindukulasooriya (2025).
(arabic)OpenRefine and QuickStatements - In this 2nd session of the Arabic Wikidata Days 2024, advanced skills of OR such as improving and importing tabular data. QS will also be demonstrated and how it simplifies adding and editing Wikidata. Presented by Professor Qais Shraideh.
Resource, Description & Access & STA - Michaela Edelmann introduces the cataloging platform that runs on Wikibase for the German-speaking DACH countries.
New developments of Wikibase-as-a-Service at the Open Science Lab (part of NFDI4Culture). Presented at Art Loves History Wiki Conference, it shows developments to the WB software suite.
Tool of the week
Holonet Galactic Map - Explore information and facts of the planets that inhabit the Star Wars universe, powered by Wikidata.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
⚠️ Wikidata Query Service graph split: The graph split is about 2 months away. If you are doing queries that involve scholarly articles or if you have an application that does you will be affected. Please check d:Wikidata:SPARQL query service/WDQS graph split for details.
We (Peter F. Patel-Schneider and Egezort) want to run a course on the Wikidata Ontology for a limited number of participants. Designed for those already familiar with Wikidata, it will present information about ontologies and how they form the core of Wikidata, incorporating several exercises on analyses of and fixes to the Wikidata ontology. Upon successful completion (ending with a group project in consultation by us), participants will receive certificates. Please give feedback and suggestions to improve the structure and course content (found in more detail at WikiProject:Ontology Course) which will be incorporated into our Wikimedia rapid grant application to support the effort. Interested in helping or want to share your thoughts? Let us know.
Several database changes will impact Wikidata in the coming months, including the migration of the term store (wbt_ tables) to a dedicated cluster to improve performance and enable future growth. This move will speed up most Wikidata SQL queries but prevent direct joins between term store data and other Wikidata tables. Additionally, the wb_type table will be removed, with its mapping hardcoded in Wikibase, simplifying the codebase. More details.
Call for projects and mentors for Google Summer of Code 2025! Deadline: February 28th. More info!
nomenclatural type of (taxon item of which this item is the taxonomic type (name-bearing type), e.g. the family for which this genus is the type, the genus for which this species is the type, the taxon for which this type specimen is the type, ect...)
World Heritage type (Propriety of World heritage site : the Type (Cultural, Natural, Mixed))
location code (the location code of the location item. Should either be used with qualifier property {{Q|P459}} to specify which location code system being used, or be used as the qualifier of {{P|31}}.)
DIF historia player ID (Identifier for a sportsperson connected to Djurgårdens IF on difhistoria.se (official site))
directs readers to (document or class of documents to which this item or class directs readers (aliases: is citation of {{!}} links to {{!}} refers to {{!}} target))
items classified (class of items that this classification system classifies (aliases: items categorized {{!}} classifies {{!}} categorizes))
WikiProject: Ontology Course - as mentioned above, this WikiProject plans to be a certified course to teahc participants about proper Wikidata ontologies.
Storage growth: We are continuing to make some changes to the terms-related database table in order to scale better (phab:T351802)
Wikibase REST API: We are continuing to work on bringing search to the REST API (phab:T383126)
mul language code: Support for the language code has been rolled out fully
EntitySchemas: We finished adding language fallback to the heading of EntitySchema pages (phab:T228423)
Sitelinks: Fixed a bug that prevented linking Wikidata Items from Wikipedias (phab:T385261)
Scoped search: We continued working on improving the main search field on Wikidata in order to allow you to search for Properties, Lexemes, etc more easily with it (phab:T321543)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Editors who use the "Special characters" editing-toolbar menu can now see the 32 special characters you have used most recently, across editing sessions on that wiki. This change should help make it easier to find the characters you use most often. The feature is in both the 2010 wikitext editor and VisualEditor. [13]
Editors using the 2010 wikitext editor can now create sublists with correct indentation by selecting the line(s) you want to indent and then clicking the toolbar buttons.[14] You can now also insert <code> tags using a new toolbar button.[15] Thanks to user stjn for these improvements.
Help is needed to ensure the citation generator works properly on each wiki.
(1) Administrators should update the local versions of the page MediaWiki:Citoid-template-type-map.json to include entries for preprint, standard, and dataset; Here are example diffs to replicate for 'preprint' and for 'standard' and 'dataset'.
(2.1) If the citoid map in the citation template used for these types of references is missing, one will need to be added. (2.2) If the citoid map does exist, the TemplateData will need to be updated to include new field names. Here are example updates for 'preprint' and for 'standard' and 'dataset'. The new fields that may need to be supported are archiveID, identifier, repository, organization, repositoryLocation, committee, and versionNumber. [16]
The WMF executive team delivers a new update; plus, the latest EU policy report, good-bye to the German Wikipedia's Café, and other news from the Wikimedia world.
Wikimedians and newbies celebrate 24 years of Wikipedia in the Brooklyn Central Library. Special guests Stephen Harrison and Clay Shirky joined in conversation.
Your recent article submission to Articles for Creation has been reviewed. Unfortunately, it has not been accepted at this time. The reason left by Theroadislong was:
This submission's references do not show that the subject qualifies for a Wikipedia article—that is, they do not show significant coverage (not just passing mentions) about the subject in published, reliable, secondary sources that are independent of the subject (see the guidelines on the notability of people). Before any resubmission, additional references meeting these criteria should be added (see technical help and learn about mistakes to avoid when addressing this issue). If no additional references exist, the subject is not suitable for Wikipedia.
The comment the reviewer left was:
passing mebtios and listings do not count towards notability.
Please check the submission for any additional comments left by the reviewer. You are encouraged to edit the submission to address the issues raised and resubmit after they have been resolved.
If you would like to continue working on the submission, go to Draft:Laurel Schwulst and click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window.
If you do not edit your draft in the next 6 months, it will be considered abandoned and may be deleted.
Hello, Wil540 art!
Having an article draft declined at Articles for Creation can be disappointing. If you are wondering why your article submission was declined, please post a question at the Articles for creation help desk. If you have any other questions about your editing experience, we'd love to help you at the Teahouse, a friendly space on Wikipedia where experienced editors lend a hand to help new editors like yourself! See you there! Theroadislong (talk) 17:17, 8 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Germany report: Exploring Wikidata & Building Community for Cultural Heritage Professionals
Indonesia report: Celebrating Public Domain Day 2025 in Indonesia
Italy report: New Wikimedia Italia Grant for GLAMs
Netherlands report: 3 Million Dutch Cultural Heritage Images in Commons & 400,000 RCE images now in higher resolution & Usage of DBNL in Dutch Wikipedia articles
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-02-10. Missed the previous one? See issue #665
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
TiagoLubianaBot 5 - Task(s): Add image or reference illustration based on categories for botanical illustrations on Wikimedia Commons. Only add when only 1 or 2 files in category.
Closed request for permissions/Bot: MangadexBot - Task(s): add metadata from mangadex to manga with Mangadex manga ID - closed as relevant Property has been deprecated and marked for deletion.
Whose (Wiki)Data is it anyway? - Ethics & Consent when cataloguing people, places and things. An on-site Library workshop of the Toronto Metropolitan University, February 12, 1200 - 1600 EST (UTC-5).
Comics Edit-A-Thon for Black History month, hosted by the Center for Research Data and Digital Scholarship of the University of Colorado (onsite only & registration required). February 12, 1300 - 1500 MST (UTC-7).
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Blogs
Making SPARQL more accessible: Daniel Motz's bachelor's thesis on visual query graphs, check out their project in Tool of the Week
Preserving Community History with Wikibase - Tan Li Qi of MyCommunity, a Singaporean nonprofit dedicated to preserving the stories of everyday people by documenting community narratives, social memories, and local heritage.
Query by Graph - build a SPARQL query using drag'n'drop visual elements. This is an interesting tool that provides another way to approach building SPARQL queries, especially for those that find the Query builder or raw SPARQL unintuitive or complex.
CivData - "Cividata makes the diverse world of non-profit organizations visible. As a volunteer project, Cividata provides a comprehensive overview of non-profit organizations worldwide, based on data from Wikipedia's sister project Wikidata."
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Creation of the interim Global Resource Distribution Committee - Call for candidates ends February 25, midnight (AOE). The interim GDRC is being established to oversee and adjust resource distribution for the Community Fund, aligning with the movement's evolving needs. Currently open to applications from candidates with experience in grantmaking, budgeting and knowledge of Wikimedia's grant types. Further information on the role and how to apply can be found on the GDRC Meta page
Curationist seeks Digital Archivist - Curationist, a free online resource for cultural heritage seeks a part-time archiver who can navigate Wikidata, SPARQL and create metadata and support writers.
romantic orientation (pattern of romantic attraction of this person or fictional character — use ONLY IF they have stated it themselves, unambiguously, or it has been widely agreed upon by historians after their death)
location code (the location code of the location (please use more specific property if available))
directs readers to (document or class of documents to which this item or class directs readers)
nomenclatural type of (taxon item of which this item is the taxonomic type (name-bearing type), e.g. the family for which this genus is the type, the genus for which this species is the type, the taxon for which this type specimen is the type, ect...)
Future Audiences: Watch the recording for lessons from the short video experiments. A new Discord bot experiment as a way to interact with Wikipedia, the Future Audiences Discord server and future plans for experiments around how to use gamification.
Tech News: Editors who use the “Special characters” editing-toolbar menu can now see the 32 special characters you have used most recently, across editing sessions on that wiki; The Data Platform Engineering team has added a couple of new fields to MediaWiki History dumps to support the Temporary Accounts initiative. More updates from tech news week 05 and 06.
Product & Tech Advisory Council: The council looked at data, needs and trends to make a recommendation for the Foundation's annual plan. They recommended that improving mobile contribution experiences has the greatest potential to bring in new and unheard voices onto Wikipedia and sister projects, and improve the experience of readers and contributors most widely. They are requesting feedback and discussion.
Structured Tasks: The "Add an Image" structured task is being tested on a representative sample of Wikipedias which allows users to add an image and an appropriate caption to a Wikipedia article.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
The Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) has published a draft of their recommendations for the Wikimedia Foundation's Product and Technology department. They have recommended focusing on mobile experiences, particularly contributions. They request community feedback at the talk page by 21 February.
Updates for editors
The "Special pages" portlet link will be moved from the "Toolbox" into the "Navigation" section of the main menu's sidebar by default. This change is because the Toolbox is intended for tools relating to the current page, not tools relating to the site, so the link will be more logically and consistently located. To modify this behavior and update CSS styling, administrators can follow the instructions at T385346. [19]
As part of this year's work around improving the ways readers discover content on the wikis, the Web team will be running an experiment with a small number of readers that displays some suggestions for related or interesting articles within the search bar. Please check out the project page for more information.
View all 22 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the global blocks log will now be shown directly on the Special:CentralAuth page, similarly to global locks, to simplify the workflows for stewards. [21]
Updates for technical contributors
Wikidata now supports a special language as a "default for all languages" for labels and aliases. This is to avoid excessive duplication of the same information across many languages. If your Wikidata queries use labels, you may need to update them as some existing labels are getting removed. [22]
The function getDescription was invoked on every Wiki page read and accounts for ~2.5% of a page's total load time. The calculated value will now be cached, reducing load on Wikimedia servers. [23]
As part of the RESTBase deprecation effort, the /page/related endpoint has been blocked as of February 6, 2025, and will be removed soon. This timeline was chosen to align with the deprecation schedules for older Android and iOS versions. The stable alternative is the "morelike" action API in MediaWiki, and a migration example is available. The MediaWiki Interfaces team can be contacted for any questions. [24]
In depth
The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: Updates about the "Contribute" menu; details on some of the newest language editions of Wikipedia; details on new languages supported by the MediaWiki interface; updates on the Community-defined lists feature; and more.
The latest Chart Project newsletter is available. It includes updates on the progress towards bringing better visibility into global charts usage and support for categorizing pages in the Data namespace on Commons.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-02-17. Missed the previous one? See issue #666
Discussions
Open request for CheckUser: Lymantria (RfP scheduled to end at 19 February 2025 04:22 UTC)
New request for comments: Anna's Archive - The RFC is about whether Wikidata should import and store metadata from Anna's Archive, considering legal, copyright, and technical challenges.
New Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group project series! We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group project series session on Tuesday, 18 February, 2025 at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET Time Zone Converter. Eric Willey will be facilitating a series of four sessions focused on starting a Wikidata project from the foundation up at your institution. The second session will focus on choosing your project. Event page
Wikidata and Wikibase: Curriculum Transformation in the Digital Humanities. Talk on Wednesday, 5 March. By Information Services, University of Edinburgh. (register)
Fedipol (Fediverse Activity Tracker) is a Wikidata-based tool used for tracking activity and analyzing accounts related to German political parties, institutions, and instances on the Fediverse.
Peh-oe-ji (writing system for {{Q|36778|Taiwan Taigi}} or other {{Q|36495}} language varieties in Fujian and South East Asia.)
Taiwanese Taigi Romanization System (romanization system for {{Q|36778|Taiwan Taigi}} or other {{Q|36495}} language varieties in Fujian and South East Asia.)
leader of organization (This property identifies the top executive leader of an organization, regardless of the specific title used by the organization.)
Search: We are continuing the work on the improved search that lets you limit your search more easily to other entity types besides Items like Lexemes and Properties (phab:T321543)
RDF: We are working on aligning the RDF export to the Query Service prefixes (phab:T384344)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
Communities using growth tools can now showcase one event on the Special:Homepage for newcomers. This feature will help newcomers to be informed about editing activities they can participate in. Administrators can create a new event to showcase at Special:CommunityConfiguration. To learn more about this feature, please read the Diff post, have a look at the documentation, or contact the Growth team.
Updates for editors
Highlighted talk pages improvements
Starting next week, talk pages at these wikis – Spanish Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia – will get a new design. This change was extensively tested as a Beta feature and is the last step of talk pages improvements. [25]
You can now navigate to view a redirect page directly from its action pages, such as the history page. Previously, you were forced to first go to the redirect target. This change should help editors who work with redirects a lot. Thanks to user stjn for this improvement. [26]
When a Cite reference is reused many times, wikis currently show either numbers like "1.23" or localized alphabetic markers like "a b c" in the reference list. Previously, if there were so many reuses that the alphabetic markers were all used, an error message was displayed. As part of the work to modernize Cite customization, these errors will no longer be shown and instead the backlinks will fall back to showing numeric markers like "1.23" once the alphabetic markers are all used.
The log entries for each change to an editor's user-groups are now clearer by specifying exactly what has changed, instead of the plain before and after listings. Translators can help to update the localized versions. Thanks to user Msz2001 for these improvements.
A new filter has been added to the Special:Nuke tool, which allows administrators to mass delete pages, to enable users to filter for pages in a range of page sizes (in bytes). This allows, for example, deleting pages only of a certain size or below. [27]
Non-administrators can now check which pages are able to be deleted using the Special:Nuke tool. Thanks to user MolecularPilot for this and the previous improvements. [28]
View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed in the configuration for the AV1 video file format, which enables these files to play again. [29]
Updates for technical contributors
Parsoid Read Views is going to be rolling out to most Wiktionaries over the next few weeks, following the successful transition of Wikivoyage to Parsoid Read Views last year. For more information, see the Parsoid/Parser Unification project page. [30][31]
Developers of tools that run on-wiki should note that mw.Uri is deprecated. Tools requiring mw.Uri must explicitly declare mediawiki.Uri as a ResourceLoader dependency, and should migrate to the browser native URL API soon. [32]
Initially launched in late 2010/early 2011 for a run of four months, The Downlink was unpublished for more than nine years, after which a second volume was published from October 2020 to October 2021. This second volume was very different from the first volume, both in style and structure. A December issue was planned (for some reason, the second volume became volume 1 in April 2021), but was never finished. Like with volume 2, this volume 3 was intended to come with changes, though primarily to style.
Volume 3 will not feature any significant changes to style or structure. This both provides continuity with the previous volume and allows the contributors to construct each issue relatively easily. However, following volumes may see changes to style, format, and upload schedule. As it is still very early in the year, a discussion on this is not yet necessary, but suggestions of all kinds are always welcome at the talk page.
On 30 January, Sunita Williams broke Peggy Whitson's record for most time spent on spacewalks by a woman, at 62 hours and 6 minutes total.
ISRO successfully docked two SpaDeX satellites on 16 January, making India the fourth country (including the EU) to dock two vehicles in space.
Blue Origin's New Glenn launch vehicle completed its maiden flight on 16 January. The payload was successfully placed in orbit, while the first staged failed to land on the recovery ship.
Gene Cernan was the eleventh and (as of 2025) last person to ever step foot on the moon. In addition to being an astronaut, he was an aviator in the US Navy and engineer. Apollo 17 was his second Apollo mission, as he served as Apollo 10's lunar module pilot. He died in Houston on 16 January, 2017. He was the first astronaut to be buried at Texas State Cemetery.
Since December 2024, five new high-importance, eight new mid-importance, forty new low-importance, and 1,522 new NA-importance articles have been created. Fifteen unknown-importance articles have been removed, for a total of 1,560 more articles. One article has been promoted to Good Article status. There are also three more B-class articles, eleven more C-class articles, 23 more Start-class articles, four more Stub-class articles, 4 more lists, and 34 more files.
Discuss & propose changes to The Downlink at The Downlink talk page. To unsubscribe from the newsletter remove your name from the mailing list.
Newsletter contributor: Ships&Space
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Hello! This is Luiysia again. Welcome to everyone who joined the mailing list from our Wikipedia Day meetup! Here are the details for our March bimonthly meetup.
The meetup will start at Sipping Turtle Cafe, in the Logan Sqaure neighborhood, at 11 AM.
New request for comments: Certify the Wikidata trainers? - Initially discussed in Project Chat, this RfC looks to establish a clear community-endorsed policy on how Wikidata Trainers can be appropriately certified and their skills demonstrated and recognized.
The WikidataDiffAnalyzer is a Ruby gem designed to parse and analyze differences between Wikidata revisions, providing detailed statistics on changes to claims, labels, descriptions, aliases, site links, and more, while also supporting analysis of merges, redirects, and other edit types.
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
Date filed (Filing date for a document, e.g. a patent or court case. Alternative names include <code>date submitted</code>, <code>submission date</code>, <code>filing date</code>, etc. These are all distinct from dates of issuance, granting, acceptance, publication, etc. that are public-facing and have to do with the last stage in a publication process. Searches for [https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?search=date+filed&title=Special:Search&profile=advanced&fulltext=1&ns120=1 similar] terms yielded [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=filing&ns120=1&fulltext=Search+for+a+property&fulltext=Search no results], so apologies if this is redundant.)
Showcase Lexemes: år (L743600) - Nynorsk noun that can mean "a vein", "road", "talent", "an ore", "insect wing part" or "small stripe with a different colour from its surroundings."
Development
Hosting the Data Reuse Days
Wikibase REST API: We are continuing the work on a search endpoint for the API (phab:T383126)
Search: We are continuing to work on the search field that lets you search other entity types as well and not just Items (phab:T321543
Mobile editing: We are designing prototypes for first testing sessions
Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) Connect: The first edition of this regional community call for 2025 will be held on February 22.
Wikimedia Research Showcase: The next showcase will be about "Wikipedia Administrator Recruitment, Retention, and Attrition" and will take place on February 26 at 17:30 UTC.
Celebrate Women 2025: The Gender Organizing community in the Wikimedia Movement hosts an annual campaign every March called Celebrate Women. Conversation hours to learn about some exciting tools that can support your efforts at closing the gender gap will be held on February 25 at 14:00–16:00 UTC.
Outreachy: Wikimedia Foundation is participating in Round 30 of the Outreachy program that runs from June – August 2025. The deadline to submit projects is March 4 at 16:00 UTC .
Growth features: The new Community Updates module is a new feature to facilitate the connection between wiki editing initiatives and newcomers.
Simple article summaries: The Web team at the Wikimedia Foundation has introduced Simple Article Summaries project on select Wikipedias. It aims to display article summaries that would be easy to digest for readers.
Language and internationalization: Five new languages added to Wikipedia as part of the future of language incubation initiative. Read more on the latest edition of the Language and internationalization newsletter.
Tech News: Communities using growth tools can now showcase one event on the Special:Homepage for newcomers. More updates from tech news week 07 and 08.
Community Insights: The Community Insights 2024 report captures new insights on newcomers (who are more likely to be younger), their motivations (97% liked that their contributions help others), and how for the first time, more than half of respondents (51%) agreed that the Wikimedia Foundation communicates well about its projects and initiatives.
Let’s Connect Learning Clinic: Watch the recording of WikiLearn Essentials for Course Creators: Building Community Skills Online session 1.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Administrators can now customize how the Babel feature creates categories using Special:CommunityConfiguration/Babel. They can rename language categories, choose whether they should be auto-created, and adjust other settings. [33]
The wikimedia.org portal has been updated – and is receiving some ongoing improvements – to modernize and improve the accessibility of our portal pages. It now has better support for mobile layouts, updated wording and links, and better language support. Additionally, all of the Wikimedia project portals, such as wikibooks.org, now support dark mode when a reader is using that system setting. [34][35][36]
View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that prevented clicking on search results in the web-interface for some Firefox for Android phone configurations. [38]
Meetings and events
The next Language Community Meeting is happening soon, February 28th at 14:00 UTC. This week's meeting will cover: highlights and technical updates on keyboard and tools for the Sámi languages, Translatewiki.net contributions from the Bahasa Lampung community in Indonesia, and technical Q&A. If you'd like to join, simply sign up on the wiki page.
From patrolling new edits to uploading photos or joining a campaign, you can count on the Wikimedia platform to be up and running — in your language, anywhere in the world. That is, except for a couple of minutes during the equinoctes.
All the information you need to start working on your Wikimania 2025 program submissions is now available on the Wiki. Deadline: March 31 st, Anywhere on Earth.
New Wikidata Event! The upcoming "Wikidata and Sister Projects" event (May 29–June 1) is looking for speakers to share how Wikidata connects with other Wikimedia projects - if you are interested, request more info or submit your session idea here.
New Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group project series! We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group project series session on Tuesday, March 4, 2025 at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET Time Zone Converter Eric Willey will be facilitating a series of four sessions focused on starting a Wikidata project from the foundation up at your institution. The third session will focus on making the most of your time and work. Event page.
Wiki Loves Ramadan 2025 - annual global contest aimed at documenting and sharing the diverse customs and traditions observed during the month of Ramadan. Date: 25 February 2025 – 16 April 2025. Register here!
Showcase Lexemes: baguette (L7347) - French noun that can mean "elongated type of bread loaf", "elongated type of bread loaf", "conductor's baton", "chopsticks", "drum sticks" or "magic wand".
Development
Wikibase REST API: We are continuing the work on the simple Item search (phab:T383126)
Dumps: We fixed an issue that prevented the dumps from being generated (phab:T386401)
Search: We are continuing to work on the search UI that will let you search not just Items but also other entity types (phab:T321543)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
All logged-in editors using the mobile view can now edit a full page. The "Edit full page" link is accessible from the "More" menu in the toolbar. This was previously only available to editors using the Advanced mobile contributions setting. [39]
Interface administrators can now help to remove the deprecated Cite CSS code matching "mw-ref" from their local MediaWiki:Common.css. The list of wikis in need of cleanup, and the code to remove, can be found with this global search and in this example, and you can learn more about how to help on the CSS migration project page. The Cite footnote markers ("[1]") are now rendered by Parsoid, and the deprecated CSS is no longer needed. The CSS for backlinks ("mw:referencedBy") should remain in place for now. This cleanup is expected to cause no visible changes for readers. Please help to remove this code before March 20, after which the development team will do it for you.
When editors embed a file (e.g. [[File:MediaWiki.png]]) on a page that is protected with cascading protection, the software will no longer restrict edits to the file description page, only to new file uploads.[40] In contrast, transcluding a file description page (e.g. {{:File:MediaWiki.png}}) will now restrict edits to the page.[41]
When editors revert a file to an earlier version it will now require the same permissions as ordinarily uploading a new version of the file. The software now checks for 'reupload' or 'reupload-own' rights,[42] and respects cascading protection.[43]
When administrators are listing pages for deletion with the Nuke tool, they can now also list associated talk pages and redirects for deletion, alongside pages created by the target, rather than needing to manually delete these pages afterwards. [44]
The previously noted update to Single User Login, which will accommodate browser restrictions on cross-domain cookies by moving login and account creation to a central domain, will now roll out to all users during March and April. The team plans to enable it for all new account creation on Group0 wikis this week. See the SUL3 project page for more details and an updated timeline.
Since last week there has been a bug that shows some interface icons as black squares until the page has fully loaded. It will be fixed this week. [45]
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed with loading images in very old versions of the Firefox browser on mobile. [47]
This year, the Growth team is exploring ways to help more new account holders start editing—and do so constructively, meaning their edits are not reverted. Our latest experiments include:
Gradual rollout of "Add a Link" at English Wikipedia – We are gradually introducing the "Add a Link" structured task to newcomers at English Wikipedia (T386029). This serves as a natural A/B test to measure its impact on activation, retention, and revert rates (T382603). Previous experiments on pilot wikis showed that "Add a Link" increases newcomer participation, particularly by helping them make constructive (non-reverted) edits.
Testing in-article suggestions for first-time editors – Many new account holders want to contribute but don’t know where to start. To help, we’re piloting a feature that surfaces structured task suggestions directly in an article’s read view for brand-new editors (T385343). These suggestions will appear for logged-in users with no edits, providing a clear, simple way to begin contributing that is surfaced while they read.
Newcomers often struggle to find their place in Wikipedia’s collaborative environment. While experienced editors easily discover events like edit-a-thons and writing campaigns, newcomers often miss out.
To bridge this gap, we launched the Community Updates module for the Newcomer Homepage. This module is disabled by default, allowing Community Admins to decide how (or if) to use it.
If your community hosts events, consider setting up a Community Update to engage and welcome newcomers! Learn more on Diff. To configure, visit Special:CommunityConfiguration.
Community Configuration is now available across all wikis, including non-Wikipedia projects (T383910). Community Configuration allows admins to customize various features like Growth features and Automoderator for their communities, and more recently the Babel extension now allows admins to modify configuration:
Babel customization – Admins can now configure Babel settings (T374348), including category naming, automatic category creation, and more. See an example on Wikimedia Commons.
Mentors play a key role in guiding new editors. If you’re interested in mentoring, or turning mentorship on at your wiki, check out the Mentorship FAQ
Starting February 17, 100% of new accounts at English Wikipedia will be assigned a mentor (T384505).
At Spanish Wikipedia, on 50% of newcomers get a mentor. Experienced contributors are encouraged to join mentorship so that Spanish Wikipedia can provide a mentor to all new users.
In the coming months, we will continue balancing maintenance work—such as deprecating EditGrowth Config (T367574) and migrating Statslib (T359352) — with user-facing improvements that support new editors and foster the next generation of contributors.
The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/High-risk people until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.
Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article until the discussion has finished.
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The event will feature thematic video art installations and our traditional Wiki-fashion show, for which you are encouraged to dress in your finest Wikimedia clothing and accessories (bags, buttons, even books), or clothing connected to the topics you edit on wiki projects.
WMDE Blog - Highlights of Data Reuse Days: The post showcases 3 excellent apps: WikiFlix (public domain full-length films), KDE Itinerary (travel assistant app) and Scribe Keyboard (easier writing in secondary languages). These are just some of the applications built using Wikidata; check out more at the Data Reuse Days pages.
zelph: A new tool for detecting logical contradictions and making inferences in Wikidata, using a rule-based system to improve data quality and derive new facts. Check it out on GitHub or explore results on the project website.
New Tool for Women’s Day: Scheherazade identifies women without articles in your Wikipedia but present in many others, helping editors prioritize creating missing biographies.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikimedia Research Fund had launched. You're encourage to submit proposals around Wikidata. The deadline to submit your proposal is April 16, 2025.
The 4th iteration of the Wikidata:Open Online Course will begin from March 17 until April 30. Whether you're a beginner taking your first steps, an individual in need of a refresher on Wikidata concepts, or a seasoned trainer looking to level up your skills - this course is right for you.
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
kigo of (the season the sense denotes in haiku in Japanese)
Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised score (score that the subject have received on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised psychological assessment tool as administered by a suitably qualified and experienced clinician under scientifically controlled and licensed conditions, standardized conditions)
Showcase Lexemes: felle (L476372) - Bokmål verb that can mean "to make something fall", "to kill", "to force a resignation", "to prove guilt", "to let lose", "to announce" or "to join."
Development
Search: The search team at the WMF has added a new search keyword for Lexemes. You can use the keyword "inlanguage:en" or "inlanguage:Q1860" to limit your search to Lexemes with Lexeme language English and so on. Here is an example search for "bank" within English Lexemes: https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?search=L%3Abank+inlanguage%3Aen (phab:T271776)
Global Trends 2025: As part of annual planning, we identify a list of global trends that will impact the Wikimedia movement, such as changes in how and where people search for and contribute information online, the rise of misinformation and disinformation in online spaces, and evolving regulation of online information providers.
Wikimania 2025: Apply now to speak at Wikimania 2025 whether to lead a workshop, host a panel, present a poster, or showcase a tool demonstration. Submit your session by March 31 anywhere on earth. If you're interested reviewing proposals for Wikimania 2025 and helping shape the program, you can fill out a short form to apply to be a program reviewer by 17 March.
WikiConference North America 2025: Scholarship applications are now open until April 4. This conference will take place in New York City from October 16–19, 2025, under the theme “Wiki’s World Fair".
Wikimedia Enterprise and Global Advocacy at SXSW 2025: Wikimedia Enterprise is coming together with Creative Commons on March 9 for a day of conversations and panel discussions at SXSW 2025 that tackles the challenges of AI and the preservation and ethical development of open data. Global Advocacy is participating on a panel on March 8, diving into conversations about the future of the internet.
WikiCauserie: The online bi-monthly meeting aimed at bringing together the French-speaking member communities of WikiFranca will be held next on March 21 at 18:00 UTC.
Tech News: The wikimedia.org portal has been updated – and is receiving some ongoing improvements – to modernize and improve the accessibility of our portal pages. It now has better support for mobile layouts, updated wording and links, and better language support. More updates from tech news week 09 and 10.
Wikifunctions: We deployed and tested one of our main milestones for this quarter: the ability to get the right Lexeme given a Wikidata Item, or, put simpler, to get the right word from a thing.
Women’s History Month: Wikimedia Foundation is running a campaign to spotlight some of the Wikimedians working to close the gender gap on Wikimedia projects. The campaign, Knowledge is human. Knowledge is her., is aimed at reaching external audiences in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Legal Victory: The Wikimedia Foundation has won a legal victory in Germany’s courts that sets a legal precedent defending the Wikimedia projects and volunteers against "forum shopping", choosing a court in a jurisdiction whose laws might be more favorable to them.
Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees: The Board met virtually on 11 December to hold its quarterly business. See the most recent corporate actions taken on the Board Noticeboard.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Editors who use password managers at multiple wikis may notice changes in the future. The way that our wikis provide information to password managers about reusing passwords across domains has recently been updated, so some password managers might now offer you login credentials that you saved for a different Wikimedia site. Some password managers already did this, and are now doing it for more Wikimedia domains. This is part of the SUL3 project which aims to improve how our unified login works, and to keep it compatible with ongoing changes to the web-browsers we use. [48][49]
The Wikipedia Apps Team is inviting interested users to help improve Wikipedia’s offline and limited internet use. After discussions in Afrika Baraza and the last ESEAP call, key challenges like search, editing, and offline access are being explored, with upcoming focus groups to dive deeper into these topics. All languages are welcome, and interpretation will be available. Want to share your thoughts? Join the discussion or email aramadan@wikimedia.org!
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 19. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: the launch of the Community Updates module, the most recent changes in Community Configuration, and the upcoming test of in-article suggestions for first-time editors.
An old API that was previously used in the Android Wikipedia app is being removed at the end of March. There are no current software uses, but users of the app with a version that is older than 6 months by the time of removal (2025-03-31), will no longer have access to the Suggested Edits feature, until they update their app. You can read more details about this change.
Wikidata Affinity Group Update: The fourth session of Starting a Wikidata Project, originally set for March 18, will now be an asynchronous Slack discussion in the #wikidata channel of the LD4 Slack Space. Join us at 9am PT / 16:00 UTC to discuss Reporting Your Outcomes and Results. Join Slack here. Note: April programming will pause as we prepare the next series.
(German) Wikipedia Unterwegs - this time in Neu-Ulm: This travelling community meetup for German Wikimedians discusses the growing ecosystem of Wikipedia, Wikidata and Commons.
REST in Rust by Magnus: "A new Rust crate has been developed to simplify access to the Wikibase REST API, featuring industry-level coding standards, 248 unit tests, >97% code coverage, and high maintainability. Check out the GitHub repo and contribute via the issue tracker or pull requests!"
The Wikidata Vector Database prototype is almost ready! Developers interested in integrating semantic search into their applications and editors looking to explore Wikidata items using natural language search are invited to reach out for more details: philippe.saadewikimedia.de
OAI formatter (formatter to generate ID compatible with Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting services)
AI-generation prompt (exact prompt that was used to generate this AI-generated media or work)
data analysis method (methods used in the main item for inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information)
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
watercraft prefix (prefix applied to watercraft operated by different organisations)
accused (person or organization who has been accused of carrying out this harmful, illegal, or immoral act without having received a criminal conviction or where the accused have been acquitted in a court of law)
applies to volume (volume of the item (usually edition of a work) to which the claim applies)
oxygen endurance (The maximum time a submarine, spacecraft or enclosed vehicle can sustain life using its onboard oxygen supply.)
Showcase Lexemes: Knoten (L298686) - German noun that can mean "knot", "fundamental unit of which graphs (in graph theory) are formed", "point where an orbit crosses a plane of reference to which it is inclined", or "hair wrapped in a circular coil around itself (bun)."
Development
Wikibase REST API: We continued the work on adding search to the API (phab:T383126)
Search: We are continuing the work on making it easier to search for entities other than Items in the search box (phab:T338483)
Query Service: We set up the constraint checks to use the split graph instead of the full graph (phab:T374021)
Integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We are looking into how changes from Wikidata are represented on the other Wikimedia projects and how that can be improved (phab:T386200)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
Twice a year, around the equinoxes, the Wikimedia Foundation's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team performs a datacenter server switchover, redirecting all traffic from one primary server to its backup. This provides reliability in case of a crisis, as we can always fall back on the other datacenter. Thanks to the Listen to Wikipedia tool, you can hear the switchover take place: Before it begins, you'll hear the steady stream of edits; Then, as the system enters a brief read-only phase, the sound stops for a couple of minutes, before resuming after the switchover. You can read more about the background and details of this process on the Diff blog. If you want to keep an ear out for the next server switchover, listen to the wikis on March 19 at 14:00 UTC.
On Wikimedia Commons, a new system to select the appropriate file categories has been introduced: if a category has one or more subcategories, users will be able to click on an arrow that will open the subcategories directly within the form, and choose the correct one. The parent category name will always be shown on top, and it will always be possible to come back to it. This should decrease the amount of work for volunteers in fixing/creating new categories. The change is also available on mobile. These changes are part of planned improvements to the UploadWizard.
The Community Tech team is seeking wikis to join a pilot for the Multiblocks feature and a refreshed Special:Block page in late March. Multiblocks enables administrators to impose multiple different types of blocks on the same user at the same time. If you are an admin or steward and would like us to discuss joining the pilot with your community, please leave a message on the project talk page.
Starting March 25, the Editing team will test a new feature for Edit Check at 12 Wikipedias: Multi-Check. Half of the newcomers on these wikis will see all Reference Checks during their edit session, while the other half will continue seeing only one. The goal of this test is to see if users are confused or discouraged when shown multiple Reference Checks (when relevant) within a single editing session. At these wikis, the tags used on edits that show References Check will be simplified, as multiple tags could be shown within a single edit. Changes to the tags are documented on Phabricator. [50]
The Global reminder bot, which is a service for notifying users that their temporary user-rights are about to expire, now supports using the localized name of the user-rights group in the message heading. Translators can see the listing of existing translations and documentation to check if their language needs updating or creation.
The GlobalPreferences gender setting, which is used for how the software should refer to you in interface messages, now works as expected by overriding the local defaults. [51]
View all 26 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the Wikipedia App for Android had a bug fixed for when a user is browsing and searching in multiple languages. [52]
Updates for technical contributors
Later this week, the way that Codex styles are loaded will be changing. There is a small risk that this may result in unstyled interface message boxes on certain pages. User generated content (e.g. templates) is not impacted. Gadgets may be impacted. If you see any issues please report them. See the linked task for details, screenshots, and documentation on how to fix any affected gadgets.
The European Space Agency's space telescope INTEGRAL was retired on 28 February after 22 years, five months, and one day. It is expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere in 2029.
The Family Portrait of the Solar System taken by Voyager 1
The Family Portrait, or sometimes Portrait of the Planets, is an image of the Solar System acquired by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990, from a distance of approximately 6 billion km (40 AU; 3.7 billion mi) from Earth. It features individual frames of six planets and a partial background indicating their relative positions. The picture is a mosaic of 60 frames. The frames used to compose the image were the last photographs taken by either Voyager spacecraft (which continued to relay other telemetry afterward). The frames were also the source of the famous Pale Blue Dot image of the Earth. Astronomer Carl Sagan, who was part of the Voyager imaging team, campaigned for many years to have the pictures taken.
Image of the month
STS-98 following liftoff
Launched on 7 February 2001, STS-98 delivered to the Destiny laboratory module of the International Space Station. Flown by Atlantis, it was the first human spaceflight mission of the 21st century. The shuttle landed at Edwards Air Force Base on 20 February after being docked with the ISS for almost seven days. The crew consisted of Kenneth Cockrell, commander, Mark L. Polansky, pilot, Robert Curbeam, mission specialist 1, Marsha Ivins, mission specialist 2 and flight engineer, and Thomas David Jones, mission specialist 3.
Members
New Members: No new members.
Number of active members: 200.
Total number of members: 426.
February Launches All times stated here are in UTC. See a current list: here.
Since January 2025, one new high-importance, sixteen new low-importance, nineteen new NA-importance, and twelve new unknown-importance articles have been created, for a total of 58 new articles. One article has been demoted from Good Article status. There are also one more A-class article, one more B-class article, nine fewer C-class articles, thirteen more Start-class articles, three more Stub-class articles, and one more list.
Discuss & propose changes to The Downlink at The Downlink talk page. To unsubscribe from the newsletter remove your name from the Mailing list.
Newsletter contributors: Ships&Space, Geni
P&T Annual Planning: The Product & Technology department publishes its plans early in the annual planning process, which is on Meta-Wiki and open for feedback. These objectives and key results are not a list of projects, but instead, a set of directions for problems to solve and impacts to achieve over the course of the year. We look forward to engaging with the community on this plan.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking your feedback on the drafts of the objectives and key results that will shape the Foundation's Product and Technology priorities for the next fiscal year (starting in July). The objectives are broad high-level areas, and the key-results are measurable ways to track the success of their objectives. Please share your feedback on the talkpage, in any language, ideally before the end of April.
Updates for editors
The CampaignEvents extension will be released to multiple wikis (see deployment plan for details) in April 2025, and the team has begun the process of engaging communities on the identified wikis. The extension provides tools to organize, manage, and promote collaborative activities (like events, edit-a-thons, and WikiProjects) on the wikis. The extension has three tools: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation Lists. It is currently on 13 Wikipedias, including English Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia, as well as Wikidata. Questions or requests can be directed to the extension talk page or in Phabricator (with #campaigns-product-team tag).
Starting the week of March 31st, wikis will be able to set which user groups can view private registrants in Event Registration, as part of the CampaignEvents extension. By default, event organizers and the local wiki admins will be able to see private registrants. This is a change from the current behavior, in which only event organizers can see private registrants. Wikis can change the default setup by requesting a configuration change in Phabricator (and adding the #campaigns-product-team tag). Participants of past events can cancel their registration at any time.
Administrators at wikis that have a customized MediaWiki:Sidebar should check that it contains an entry for the Special pages listing. If it does not, they should add it using * specialpages-url|specialpages. Wikis with a default sidebar will see the link moved from the page toolbox into the sidebar menu in April. [53]
The Minerva skin (mobile web) combines both Notice and Alert notifications within the bell icon (). There was a long-standing bug where an indication for new notifications was only shown if you had unseen Alerts. This bug is now fixed. In the future, Minerva users will notice a counter atop the bell icon when you have 1 or more unseen Notices and/or Alerts. [54]
VisualEditor has introduced a new client-side hook for developers to use when integrating with the VisualEditor target lifecycle. This hook should replace the existing lifecycle-related hooks, and be more consistent between different platforms. In addition, the new hook will apply to uses of VisualEditor outside of just full article editing, allowing gadgets to interact with the editor in DiscussionTools as well. The Editing Team intends to deprecate and eventually remove the old lifecycle hooks, so any use cases that this new hook does not cover would be of interest to them and can be shared in the task.
Developers who use the mw.Api JavaScript library, can now identify the tool using it with the userAgent parameter: var api = new mw.Api( { userAgent: 'GadgetNameHere/1.0.1' } );. If you maintain a gadget or user script, please set a user agent, because it helps with library and server maintenance and with differentiating between legitimate and illegitimate traffic. [55][56]
Wikidata Affinity Group Update: The fourth session of Starting a Wikidata Project, originally set for March 18, will now be an asynchronous Slack discussion in the #wikidata channel of the LD4 Slack Space. Join us at 9am PT / 16:00 UTC to discuss Reporting Your Outcomes and Results. Join Slack here. Note: April programming will pause as we prepare the next series.
(German) Wikipedia Unterwegs - this time in Neu-Ulm: This travelling community meetup for German Wikimedians discusses the growing ecosystem of Wikipedia, Wikidata and Commons.
REST in Rust by Magnus: "A new Rust crate has been developed to simplify access to the Wikibase REST API, featuring industry-level coding standards, 248 unit tests, >97% code coverage, and high maintainability. Check out the GitHub repo and contribute via the issue tracker or pull requests!"
The Wikidata Vector Database prototype is almost ready! Developers interested in integrating semantic search into their applications and editors looking to explore Wikidata items using natural language search are invited to reach out for more details: philippe.saadewikimedia.de
OAI formatter (formatter to generate ID compatible with Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting services)
AI-generation prompt (exact prompt that was used to generate this AI-generated media or work)
data analysis method (methods used in the main item for inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information)
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
watercraft prefix (prefix applied to watercraft operated by different organisations)
accused (person or organization who has been accused of carrying out this harmful, illegal, or immoral act without having received a criminal conviction or where the accused have been acquitted in a court of law)
applies to volume (volume of the item (usually edition of a work) to which the claim applies)
oxygen endurance (The maximum time a submarine, spacecraft or enclosed vehicle can sustain life using its onboard oxygen supply.)
Showcase Lexemes: Knoten (L298686) - German noun that can mean "knot", "fundamental unit of which graphs (in graph theory) are formed", "point where an orbit crosses a plane of reference to which it is inclined", or "hair wrapped in a circular coil around itself (bun)."
Development
Wikibase REST API: We continued the work on adding search to the API (phab:T383126)
Search: We are continuing the work on making it easier to search for entities other than Items in the search box (phab:T338483)
Query Service: We set up the constraint checks to use the split graph instead of the full graph (phab:T374021)
Integration in the other Wikimedia projects: We are looking into how changes from Wikidata are represented on the other Wikimedia projects and how that can be improved (phab:T386200)
Wikidata and Sister Projects to take place May 29 - June 1. Please send us your session ideas, we still have lots of space for proposals. This is a great chance to highlight the benefits of Wikidata use in other WM projects. See Talk page for proposals.
Lexica - a mobile-friendly tool that simplifies micro contributions to lexicographical data on Wikidata, making various editing tasks accessible and intuitive for contributors of all experience levels.
data analysis method (methods used in the main item for inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information)
Hello Wil540 art, and thanks for patrolling new pages! I am just letting you know that I declined the speedy deletion of Draft:Meat pie, a page you tagged for speedy deletion, because of the following concern: A10 does not apply to drafts. You may wish to review the Criteria for Speedy Deletion before tagging further pages. Thank you. Whpq (talk) 17:34, 27 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Your recent article submission to Articles for Creation has been reviewed. Unfortunately, it has not been accepted at this time. The reason left by Gheus was:
This submission's references do not show that the subject qualifies for a Wikipedia article—that is, they do not show significant coverage (not just passing mentions) about the subject in published, reliable, secondary sources that are independent of the subject (see the guidelines on the notability of people). Before any resubmission, additional references meeting these criteria should be added (see technical help and learn about mistakes to avoid when addressing this issue). If no additional references exist, the subject is not suitable for Wikipedia.
Please check the submission for any additional comments left by the reviewer. You are encouraged to edit the submission to address the issues raised and resubmit after they have been resolved.
If you would like to continue working on the submission, go to Draft:Ashton Hall (influencer) and click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window.
If you do not edit your draft in the next 6 months, it will be considered abandoned and may be deleted.
When creating biographies, don't forget to use Template:DEFAULTSORT. Accessible from "Wiki markup" at the foot of the page being edited, it allows categories to be listed under the subject's family name rather than their first or given name.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
The Editing team is working on a new Edit check: Peacock check. This check's goal is to identify non-neutral terms while a user is editing a wikipage, so that they can be informed that their edit should perhaps be changed before they publish it. This project is at the early stages, and the team is looking for communities' input: in this Phabricator task, they are gathering on-wiki policies, templates used to tag non-neutral articles, and the terms (jargon and keywords) used in edit summaries for the languages they are currently researching. You can participate by editing the table on Phabricator, commenting on the task, or directly messaging Trizek (WMF).
Single User Login has now been updated on all wikis to move login and account creation to a central domain. This makes user login compatible with browser restrictions on cross-domain cookies, which have prevented users of some browsers from staying logged in.
Starting on March 31st, the MediaWiki Interfaces team will begin a limited release of generated OpenAPI specs and a SwaggerUI-based sandbox experience for MediaWiki REST APIs. They invite developers from a limited group of non-English Wikipedia communities (Arabic, German, French, Hebrew, Interlingua, Dutch, Chinese) to review the documentation and experiment with the sandbox in their preferred language. In addition to these specific Wikipedia projects, the sandbox and OpenAPI spec will be available on the on the test wiki REST Sandbox special page for developers with English as their preferred language. During the preview period, the MediaWiki Interfaces Team also invites developers to share feedback about your experience. The preview will last for approximately 2 weeks, after which the sandbox and OpenAPI specs will be made available across all wiki projects.
Sometimes a small, one line code change can have great significance: in this case, it means that for the first time in years we're able to run all of the stack serving maps.wikimedia.org - a host dedicated to serving our wikis and their multi-lingual maps needs - from a single core datacenter, something we test every time we perform a datacenter switchover. This is important because it means that in case one of our datacenters is affected by a catastrophe, we'll still be able to serve the site. This change is the result of extensive work by two developers on porting the last component of the maps stack over to kubernetes, where we can allocate resources more efficiently than before, thus we're able to withstand more traffic in a single datacenter. This work involved a lot of complicated steps because this software, and the software libraries it uses, required many long overdue upgrades. This type of work makes the Wikimedia infrastructure more sustainable.
Meetings and events
MediaWiki Users and Developers Workshop Spring 2025 is happening in Sandusky, USA, and online, from 14–16 May 2025. The workshop will feature discussions around the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies in different industries and will inspire and onboard new users. Registration and presentation signup is now available at the workshop's website.
Hello, Wil540 art. This is a bot-delivered message letting you know that Draft:Guild of American Luthiers, a page you created, has not been edited in at least 5 months. Drafts that have not been edited for six months may be deleted, so if you wish to retain the page, please edit it again or request that it be moved to your userspace.
If the page has already been deleted, you can request it be undeleted so you can continue working on it.
MCL's Linked Data Usergroup's Wikidata Edit-A-Thon - The Midwest Collaborative for Library Services is hosting an editathon between April 7 - 11, 2025. This is an onsite event and only available to USA states: Indiana and Michigan.
Open translations in mathematics (Oxford Seminar) - This presentation from Tim Osgood discusses the utility of mathematics for translations, a community-driven approach, and how Wikidata is contributing.
(Spanish) Socialisation: Literary Data in Bogota 2015 - 2020 - The Colombian Publishing Observatory of the Caro y Cuervo Institute presents "Metadata Model for Independent Publishing in Bogotá", containing over 31,500 data points, all catalogued in Wikidata.
(Italian) Tools for Visualising Wikidata - Carlo Bianchini presents some useful tools for visualising data and queries from Wikidata, with a focus on Digital Humanities.
Wikidata Ontology Course Peter Patel-Schneider and Ege Doğan will run a seven-week Wikidata Ontology Course starting late April / early May. It aims to expand the Wikidata community’s knowledge of the Wikidata ontology through lectures, exercises, and group projects. Participants should have prior Wikidata experience and are expected to attend lectures, complete exercises (about one hour per week), and contribute to a group project. More details |available here.
SWIS-WEM Facility Code (Unique identifier for facilities registered with the Australian Energy Market Operator for facilities operating in the South West Interconnected System Wholesale Electricity Market (SWIS-WEM Facility Code))
number of downloads (2) (number of downloads of times this application or creative work have been downloaded)
species protection status (Links species, habitat or biotope type with the regulation international or national that protects this species)
Showcase Lexemes:humpback (L322138) - English noun that can mean " kyphosis (condition of the spine)", "a person with an abnormal curvature of the spine", "humpback whale, a particular marine mammal variety", "pink salmon", "lake skygazer, a type of ray-finned fish", " type of arch bridge where the span is larger than the ramps on either side", or " humpback dolphin, a particular variety of marine mammal."
Development
Search: We continued the work on making it easier to search entity types other than Items (Lexemes, Properties, EntitySchemas) in the search box (phab:T321543)
Vector 2022 theme: We are fixing remaining issues with dark mode (phab:T385039)
Wikibase REST API: We are continuing to build out the simple Item search endpoint (phab:T386228) and are looking into the one for Properties (phab:T386377)
In accordance with our policy that Wikipedia is not for the indefinite hosting of material, the draft has been deleted. When you plan on working on it further and you wish to retrieve it, you can request its undeletion. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the submission so you can continue to work on it.
Tech News: The CampaignEvents extension will be released to multiple wikis (see deployment plan for details) in April 2025; The Editing team is working on a new Edit check: Peacock check. This check’s goal is to identify non-neutral terms while a user is editing a wikipage. More updates from tech news week 13 and 14.
Wikipedia Library: What’s new from January to March 2025.
Let's Connect Learning Clinic: Missed the last Learning Clinic on "Safe Spaces, Strong Voices: Advancing Inclusion through the UCoC"? Recording is now available.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2025-04-07. Please help Translate.
Papers: Enabling disaggregation of Asian American subgroups: a dataset of Wikidata names for disparity estimation - Paper by Lin, Q. et al (2025).
Videos
Curationist: What is it and how does it work? - Curationist utilises Wikidata to help discover, curate and share public-domian art and cultural heritage content. YouTube
(Swedish) Connecting Wikidata, OpenStreetMap and the National Archives with Magnus Sälgö YouTube
(French) Focus on Wikidata, Wikifying Science, a presentation from Delphine Montagne and Pierre-Yves Beaudouin. Canal-U TV: C@fé Renatis
Other
(Portuguese) Wikidata at School: expanding access to knowledge and tackling gender gaps! Instagram: Projeto Mais
Tool of the week
Wikidata:Tools/Wikidata for Web - also known as Wikidata for Firefox is a browser extension for Mozilla Firefox that displays data from Wikidata on various websites, enhancing the information you are already looking at, and also allows extraction of data from these websites.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikidata Ontology Course Peter Patel-Schneider and Ege Doğan will run a seven-week Wikidata Ontology Course starting late April / early May. It aims to expand the Wikidata community’s knowledge of the Wikidata ontology through lectures, exercises, and group projects. Participants should have prior Wikidata experience and are expected to attend lectures, complete exercises (about one hour per week), and contribute to a group project. More details available here.
Job Vacancy - Are you interested in helping shape the technical future of Wikimedia's knowledge graph? We are looking for a Staff Engineer (Wikidata)
We made some progress on the ScopedTypeaheadSearch feature by improving the UI, and making it translatable (phab:T390269)
We continued working on dark mode support (phab:T389633)
Wikibase REST API: We are almost done adding the last few features on the simple item and property search endpoint. We'll be happy to get feedback on these from 15.04 when they're completed
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The Design System Team is preparing to release the next major version of Codex (v2.0.0) on April 29. Editors and developers who use CSS from Codex should see the 2.0 overview documentation, which includes guidance related to a few of the breaking changes such as font-size, line-height, and size-icon.
The results of the Developer Satisfaction Survey (2025) are now available. Thank you to all participants. These results help the Foundation decide what to work on next and to review what they recently worked on.
The 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon will take place in Istanbul, Turkey, between 2–4 May. Registration for attending the in-person event will close on 13 April. Before registering, please note the potential need for a visa or e-visa to enter the country.
You are invited to Foundation and Friends' Free Culture Friday at Prime Produce on Friday, April 11. This event will feature a reception with Wikimedia Foundation staff in the afternoon, followed by a more informal salon, hackathon, and game night, utilizing Prime Produce's vast collection of board games. This replaces WikiWednesday Salon this month. No experience of anything at all is required. All are welcome!
Friday, April 11, 2025
1:30 pm – 3:00 pm (Wikimedia Foundation staff + community meet-and-greet)
Firefly Aerospace became the first commercial company to successfully achieve a soft landing on the moon on 2 March with the landing of Blue Ghost Mission 1 near Mons Latreille. It lasted the intended length of one lunar day before losing power on 16 March. It was launched with the Hakuto-R Mission 2 lander Resilience and rover Tenacious, which are planned to land in the Mare Frigoris.
On 6 March, the IM-2 mission's lunar lander Athena landed on Mons Mouton. Although intact, it landed sideways, preventing it from generating enough power to operate as designed. The mission was declared over the following day.
The Phootprint mission is a candidate for the Mars Robotic Exploration Preparation Programme 2 (MREP-2) at ESA. During 2014, ESA funded a pre-phase A feasibility study and industrial system studies of 8-month duration. Currently, it is in phase A, meaning 'mission definition study.'
The mission would last about 3.5 years, including cruise, mapping orbit, 7 days on the surface, and sample return cruise time. The spacecraft would be powered by solar arrays.
In August 2015, the ESA-Roscosmos working group on post-ExoMars cooperation, completed a joint study for a possible future Phobos Sample Return mission, and preliminary discussions were held.
Image of the month
InSight lander testing
The InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) lander was selected from among three options in August 2012. Initially planned to launch in March 2016, an instrument issue delayed the launch to May 2018, the next Earth-Mars launch window. It was successfully launched on 5 May, and landed on Elysium Planitia on 26 November 2018. Taking seismographic and thermographic readings, InSight operated for a total of 4 years and 19 days instead of its planned 2 year mission. The mission was declared over on 21 December, 2022 after contact was lost on 15 December. A re-analysis of some of its data indicates that there may be significant amounts of groundwater in Mars' crust.
Since February 2025, six new low-importance and one new unknown-importance articles have been created. One NA-importance article has been removed, for a total of six new articles. There are also five more C-class articles, three more Start-class articles, two more Stub-class articles, and one more list.
Discuss & propose changes to The Downlink at The Downlink talk page. To unsubscribe from the newsletter remove your name from the Mailing list.
Newsletter contributors: Ships&Space
Hello and welcome to the April 2025 newsletter, a quarterly digest of Guild activities since December. Don't forget you can unsubscribe at any time; see below. We extend a warm welcome to all of our new members. We wish you all happy copy-editing.
Election results: In our December 2025 coordinator election, Wracking stepped down as coordinator; we thank them for their service. Incumbents Dhtwiki, Miniapolis, and Mox Eden were reelected coordinators, and IQR and WikiEditor5678910 were newly elected coordinator, to serve through 30 June. Nominations for our mid-year Election of Coordinators will open on 1 June (UTC).
Drive: 55 editors signed up for our January Backlog Elimination Drive 33 claimed at least one copy-edit and copy-edited 611,404 words in 237 articles. Barnstars awarded are here.
Blitz: 14 editors signed up for our February Copy Editing Blitz. 10 claimed at least one copy-edit and copy-edited 46,749 words in 18 articles. Barnstars awarded are here.
Drive: 47 editors signed up for our March Backlog Elimination Drive. 28 claimed at least one copy-edit and copy-edited 479,172 words in 207 articles. Barnstars awarded are here.
Blitz: Sign up for our April Copy Editing Blitz, which runs from 13 to 19 April. Barnstars will be awarded here.
Progress report: As of 9:45, 12 April 2024 (UTC), GOCE copyeditors have processed 89 requests since 1 January 2024, and the backlog stands at 2,264 articles.
Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators Dhtwiki, IQR, Miniapolis, Mox Eden and WikiEditor5678910.
To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-04-14. Missed the previous one? See issue #674
Events
Upcoming events: The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC, 16th April 2025 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Other: Wikidata references made easier. "Several tricks to make it easier and faster, using various scripts and gadgets" to add references to Wikidata statements. By Spinster
Tool of the week
Wikidata Topic Curator is a React-based web application. It’s a new and improved version of ItemSubjector created to help Wikimedians connect items on Wikidata to the right topics. By entering a topic QID, it finds related articles using the topic’s label, aliases, or custom terms.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Join the Wikidata development team at Wikimedia Deutschland
Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject USC Libraries A WikiProject for work done at University of Southern California Libraries to connect library data with Wikidata.
Showcase Lexemes: Straße (L44061) - German noun that can mean "road", "straight", "street", "strait", "group of people inhabiting buildings along a perticular street" or "production line".
Development
We merged and prepared changes to rename wikibase:EntitySchema to wikibase:WikibaseEntitySchema in RDF (phab:T371196) – this has been announced as a breaking change and will be deployed to Wikidata on 24 April
We made some more improvements to dark mode support (phab:T389633)
We’re working on tests for the ScopedTypeaheadSearch feature (phab:T385790)
Wikibase REST API: We're going to wrap up pagination on the simple Item and property search endpoint and are working to improve our test architecture for search (phab:T386691). We're going to pick up prefix search for Items and phrase matching next!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
Later this week, the default thumbnail size will be increased from 220px to 250px. This changes how pages are shown in all wikis and has been requested by some communities for many years, but wasn't previously possible due to technical limitations. [58]
File thumbnails are now stored in discrete sizes. If a page specifies a thumbnail size that's not among the standard sizes (20, 40, 60, 120, 250, 330, 500, 960), then MediaWiki will pick the closest larger thumbnail size but will tell the browser to downscale it to the requested size. In these cases, nothing will change visually but users might load slightly larger images. If it doesn't matter which thumbnail size is used in a page, please pick one of the standard sizes to avoid the extra in-browser down-scaling step. [59][60]
Updates for editors
The Wikimedia Foundation are working on a system called Edge Uniques which will enable A/B testing, help protect against Distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks), and make it easier to understand how many visitors the Wikimedia sites have. This is so that they can more efficiently build tools which help readers, and make it easier for readers to find what they are looking for.
To improve security for users, a small percentage of logins will now require that the account owner input a one-time password emailed to their account. It is recommended that you check that the email address on your account is set correctly, and that it has been confirmed, and that you have an email set for this purpose. [61]
"Are you interested in taking a short survey to improve tools used for reviewing or reverting edits on your Wiki?" This question will be asked at 7 wikis starting next week, on Recent Changes and Watchlist pages. The Moderator Tools team wants to know more about activities that involve looking at new edits made to your Wikimedia project, and determining whether they adhere to your project's policies.
The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: an invitation for tool maintainers to attend the Toolforge UI Community Feedback Session on April 15th; recent community metrics; and recent technical blog posts.
Wiki Workshop 2025: Register for the 12th annual Wiki Workshop taking place on May 21–22. It brings together researchers and scholars from around the globe who are interested in or actively engaged in research and development on Wikimedia projects.
Learning Clinic: The upcoming Let’s Connect Learning Clinic is focusing on "Understanding and Navigating Conflict in Wikimedia Projects (Part 1)" and will take place on April 29 at 14:30 UTC.
Community Resilience and Sustainability: Quarterly Conversation hour taking place on April 24 at 18:00 UTC to discuss Trust and Safety, the Universal Code of Conduct, Committee Support, and Human Rights.
Edge Uniques: Introducing Edge Uniques, a technical approach which consists of privacy-preserving first-party cookies that will enable usability testing of features through A/B testing, more accurate counting of site visits, and a way to stop distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) with better precision.
Tech News: The Design System Team is preparing to release the next major version of Codex (v2.0.0) on April 29; Last week, the default thumbnail size was increased from 220px to 250px. This changes how pages are shown in all wikis and has been requested by some communities for many years, but wasn’t previously possible due to technical limitations. More updates from Tech News week 15 and 16.
Developer Satisfaction Survey: The results of the Developer Satisfaction Survey (2025) are available. Thank you to all participants. These results help the Foundation decide what to work on next and to review what they recently worked on.
Community Resilience: To better support community members when they are facing challenges while contributing to Wikimedia projects, the Trust and Safety team worked with the Arbitration Committees to create Project Maps of communities.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Wikifunctions is now integrated with Dagbani Wikipedia since April 15. It is the first project that will be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them in articles. A function is something that takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, such as adding up two numbers, converting miles into metres, calculating how much time has passed since an event, or declining a word into a case. Wikifunctions will allow users to do that through a simple call of a stable and global function, rather than via a local template. [62]
A new type of lint error has been created: Empty headings (documentation). The Linter extension's purpose is to identify wikitext patterns that must or can be fixed in pages and provide some guidance about what the problems are with those patterns and how to fix them. [63]
Following its publication on HuggingFace, the "Structured Contents" dataset, developed by Wikimedia Enterprise, is now also available on Kaggle. This Beta initiative is focused on making Wikimedia data more machine-readable for high-volume reusers. They are releasing this beta version in a location that open dataset communities already use, in order to seek feedback, to help improve the product for a future wider release. You can read more about the overall Structured Contents project, and about the first release that's freely usable.
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Meetings and events
The Editing and Machine Learning Teams invite interested volunteers to a video meeting to discuss Peacock check, which is the latest Edit check that will detect "peacock" or "overly-promotional" or "non-neutral" language whilst an editor is typing. Editors who work with newcomers, or help to fix this kind of writing, or are interested in how we use artificial intelligence in our projects are encouraged to attend. The meeting will be on April 28, 2025 at 18:00–19:00 UTC and hosted on Zoom.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-04-22. Missed the previous one? See issue #675. <translate>Translations are available</translate>
<translate>Past: Missed the Q2 Wikidata+Wikibase office hour? You can catch up by reading the session log here: [[<tvar name="2">d:Special:MyLanguage/Wikidata:Events/Telegram office hour 2025-04-16</tvar>|2025-04-16 (Q2 2025)]]</translate>
<translate> Press, articles, blog posts, videos </translate>
<translate>Mastodon bot</translate> <translate> that "highlights natural compounds found in plants, fungi, bacteria or animals — and includes Wikidata references and visual structure depictions."</translate>
<translate>Tool of the week</translate>
<translate>[[<tvar name="3">d:Special:MyLanguage/User:Spinster/Wikidata_references_made_easier</tvar>|User:Spinster/Wikidata references made easier]]: The script helps in adding references to statements, in order to provide context for our data, make the data more reliable, transparent and trustworthy for anyone who uses it </translate>.
<translate>Other Noteworthy Stuff</translate>
<translate>Registration is open for a Wikidata ontology course led by Peter Patel-Schneider and Ege Doğan.</translate> <translate>To register, email pfpschneidergmail.com with your Wikidata username and a brief note on your interest. The course starts 1 May, with weekly lectures on Thursdays from 1–3pm EDT (skipping 29 May and 12 June).</translate> <translate>Space may be limited; priority goes to those already interested. Participants should know Wikidata, attend sessions, complete weekly exercises (~1 hour), and join a group project</translate>. <translate>Details: Course page</translate>
Wikifunctions is now integrated with Dagbani Wikipedia since April 15. It is the first project that will be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them in articles.
<translate>Wikidata job openings at the The Wikimedia Foundation</translate>
organization code (the organization code of the organization item. Should either be used with qualifier property {{Q|P459}} to specify which system being used, or be used as the qualifier of {{P|31}}.)
organization unit code (the organization unit code of the organization unit/part/(sub)division item. Should either be used with qualifier property {{Q|P459}} to specify which system being used, or be used as the qualifier of {{P|31}}.)
Picture composition (Description of a picture composition (design rules) analogous to the Commons category “[[:commons:Category:Picture composition]]”)
<translate>WikiProject Highlights</translate>: <translate>[[<tvar name="51">d:Special:MyLanguage/Wikidata:WikiProject Taiwan/Travel</tvar>|Taiwan Travel]]</translate> - <translate>aims to create travel related items about Taiwan</translate>
<translate>[[<tvar name="6">d:Special:MyLanguage/Wikidata:Showcase items</tvar>|Showcase Items]] </translate>: Pete's Dragon (Q18786473) - 2016, film by David Lowery
<translate>[[<tvar name="7">d:Wikidata:Showcase lexemes</tvar>|Showcase Lexemes]]: Bill (L3855) - English noun (/bɪl/) that can mean "invoice", "proposed law", "bird's beak", or "a given name"</translate>:
<translate>Development</translate>
<translate>Wikidata changes in watchlist and recent changes on Wikipedia and co: We are continuing the work on making the edit summaries more understandable </translate>(phab:T386200)
<translate>Wikibase REST API: We are continuing to build out the simple search functionality</translate> (phab:T389011)
<translate>Dark mode: We are fixing a few remaining issues with dark mode support in the Vector 2022 theme</translate> (phab:T389633)
<translate> Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed [[<tvar name="8">d:Special:MyLanguage/Wikidata:Status_updates/Next#Newest_properties_and_property_proposals_to_review</tvar>|above]] </translate>.
<translate>Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme [[<tvar name="9">d:Special:MyLanguage/Wikidata:Status_updates/Next#Did_you_know?</tvar>|above]]</translate>.
<translate> Summarize your [[<tvar name="11">d:Special:MyLanguage/Wikidata:Status_updates/Next#Did_you_know?</tvar>|WikiProject's ongoing activities]] in one or two sentences</translate>.
<translate>Help [[<tvar name="11">d:Special:LanguageStats</tvar>|translate]] or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!</translate>
<translate> [[<tvar name="12">d:Special:MyLanguage/User:Pasleim/projectmerge</tvar>|Help merge identical items]] across Wikimedia projects </translate>.
<translate>Help [[<tvar name="13">d:Special:MyLanguage/Wikidata:Status updates/Next</tvar>|write the next summary!]]</translate>
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-04-28. Missed the previous one? See issue #676. Translations are available
quarry.wmcloud.org is a public querying interface for Wiki Replicas, a set of live replica SQL databases of public Wikimedia Wikis. Quarry is designed to make running queries against Wiki Replicas easy. Quarry can also be used to query public databases stored in ToolsDB.
terminal speaker (the last person able to speak the language fluently)
nomenclatural type of (taxon item of which this item is the taxonomic type (name-bearing type), e.g. the family for which this genus is the type, the genus for which this species is the type, the taxon for which this type specimen is the type, ect...)
interior designer (person responsible for the interior design of a notable building or structure)
kigo of (season which denotes the sense in haiku in Japanese)
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
defined for (the subject takes the object as parameter (or parameter tuple))
The Long Distance Walkers Association (External Identifier (URL slug) for a hiking route on The Long Distance Walkers Association website (United Kingdom only))
Showcase Lexemes: Córdoba (L642328) - Spanish noun (kór-do-ba) that can mean "a city in Spain", "a city in Argentina", or "a Mexican city"
Development
Bug: We fixed an issue where newly created Properties became inaccessible after adding a statement with a Property linking to an Item or Lexeme. The fix will go live on Wednesday. (phab:T374230)
Search: We continued implementing the new search that will make it easier to search for Properties and Lexemes in the UI (phab:T321543)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Event organizers who host collaborative activities on multiple wikis, including Bengali, Japanese, and Korean Wikipedias, will have access to the CampaignEvents extension this week. Also, admins in the Wikipedia where the extension is enabled will automatically be granted the event organizer right soon. They won't have to manually grant themselves the right before they can manage events as requested by a community.
The release of the next major version of Codex, the design system for Wikimedia, is scheduled for 29 April 2025. Technical editors will have access to the release by the week of 5 May 2025. This update will include a number of breaking changes and minor visual changes. Instructions on handling the breaking and visual changes are documented on this page. Pre-release testing is reported in T386298, with post-release issues tracked in T392379 and T392390.
Users of Wiki Replicas will notice that the database views of ipblocks, ipblocks_ipindex, and ipblocks_compat are now deprecated. Users can query the block and block_target new views that mirror the new tables in the production database instead. The deprecated views will be removed entirely from Wiki Replicas in June, 2025.
The 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon, which brings the global technical community together to connect, brainstorm, and hack existing projects, will take place from May 2 to 4th, 2025, at Istanbul, Turkey.
Statistics available via Humaniki tool. Thank you if you contributed one or more of the 1,269 articles during this period!
21 Apr 2025: 20.090% of EN-WP biographies are about women (2,061,363; 414,126 women)
24 Mar 2025: 20.070% (2,057,083 bios; 412,857 women)
Tip of the month:
Those of you who experience harassment while trying to create or improve articles about women are welcome to bring your problems to our attention on the Women in Red talk page.
Hello! This is Luiysia again. Hope everyone has been enjoying the warm weather! Here are the details for our May bimonthly meetup. The meetup will start at Botanical Cafe, in the North Center neighborhood, at 11 AM.
I hope you're doing well! As an event coordinator on English Wikipedia, I’m happy to share some news with you. You now have the event-organizer right! This gives you access to the CampaignEvents extension, a powerful set of tools to help you organize and promote events and WikiProjects more easily.
With the CampaignEvents extension, you can:
Manage event registration directly on English Wikipedia.
Use the Invitation List tool to find potential participants for your events/WikiProjects
Now that I have your attention, I’d also like to share some updates to the extension:
The Collaboration List can now be transcluded, meaning you can easily embed it on other wiki pages to share event details with more people by adding {{Special:AllEvents}}. Learn more.
Admins can now determine which namespaces are permitted for Event Registration on English Wikipedia, via Special:CommunityConfiguration. Right now, the Event namespace is permitted by default for Event Registration. However, other namespaces (such as Wikipedia, WikiProject, etc) can now be added as permitted namespaces by admins too. This can help other types of organized activities, such as WikiProjects, use Event Registration.For details, please visit: Permitted_namespaces
If you need help using these new tools, I’m here to support you. Feel free to reach out for guidance. You can also find some useful video guides on Commons.
We’re excited to see how you use these tools for WikiProjects or events! If you have any questions, please let me know.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-05-05. Missed the previous one? See issue #677. Translations are available
Discussions
Closed request for permissions/Bot: Mr Robot - No consensus reached.
OpenStreetMap: OpenStreetMap, is a project that creates and distributes free geographic data for the world. It was started because most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive, or unexpected ways .
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Ever played Redactle? Lucas put together a Wikidata version of it. Can you guess the Item? Still needs a bit of work but you can try it out now.
Showcase Lexemes: Tribe (L28956) - English noun (trīb) that can mean "a social division in traditional society", "a political subdivision", or "a genre of Techno Music":
Development
Wikidata Query Service: The search platform team finished the remaining work for the graph split and it is going live this week.
Wikipedia and co: We continued working on improving how Wikidata edits are shown on the watchlist on Wikipedia and co. We are focusing on showing labels instead of IDs for the entities (Items, Properties, ...) linked in the edit summaries (phab:T388685)
UI: We continued doing small fixes for dark mode support in the UI (phab:T385039)
Wikibase REST API: We are continuing the work on the search endpoint (phab:T383126)
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our WikiWednesday Salon at Prime Produce in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan. This month's WikiWednesday will be focused on digital safety for editors. Guest digital security trainers will join us to lead this session. All are welcome!
Please bring a laptop or the editing device of your choosing for hands-on training that will guide you through steps to take to make yourself safer online. While there will also be an online participation option, the meeting will not be recorded.
You are also invited to join the Wikimedia NYC Community and Rhizome for a community memory-focused edit-a-thon in the Financial District. All Wikipedia and Wikidata enthusiasts are welcome, new and experienced!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Admins can now choose which namespaces are permitted for Event Registration via Community Configuration (documentation). The default setup is for event registration to be permitted in the Event namespace, but other namespaces (such as the project namespace or WikiProject namespace) can now be added. With this change, communities like WikiProjects can now more easily use Event Registration for their collaborative activities.
Editors can now transclude the Collaboration List on a wiki page (documentation). The Collaboration List is an automated list of events and WikiProjects on the wikis, accessed via Special:AllEvents (example). Now, the Collaboration List can be added to all sorts of wiki pages, such as: a wiki mainpage, a WikiProject page, an affiliate page, an event page, or even a user page.
Developers who use the moment library in gadgets and user scripts should revise their code to use alternatives like the Intl library or the new mediawiki.DateFormatter library. The moment library has been deprecated and will begin to log messages in the developer console. You can see a global search for current uses, and ask related questions in this Phabricator task.
Developers who maintain a tool that queries the Wikidata term store tables (wbt_*) need to update their code to connect to a separate database cluster. These tables are being split into a separate database cluster. Tools that query those tables via the wiki replicas must be adapted to connect to the new cluster instead. Documentation and related links are available. [64]
The latest Chart Project newsletter is available. It includes updates on preparing to expand the deployment to additional wikis as soon as this week (starting May 6) and scaling up over the following weeks, plus exploring filtering and transforming source data.
Tech News: Event organizers who host collaborative activities on multiple wikis, including Bengali, Japanese, and Korean Wikipedias, now have access to the CampaignEvents extension. Also, admins in the Wikipedia where the extension is enabled will automatically be granted the event organizer right soon. More updates from Tech News week 17 and 18.
Learning Clinic: The recent Let's Connect Learning Clinic was about "Exploring Diff Blog: Sharing your story, & understanding Technical Implementation" and took place on May 6 at 12:00 UTC.
World Press Freedom Day: We will be advocating for Wikimedia's model and speaking about "Information as a Public Good in the Age of AI" for UNESCO's World Press Freedom Day event in Brussels.
Annual Report: The Foundation published the Annual Reports for both the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia Endowment. These reports highlight the impact of work done by our global community of volunteers, staff, and donors over the past year.
Board and Board committee updates: The Board met in in March to hold its quarterly business meeting and joined other meetings as part of the Wikimedia Foundation's annual strategic planning. See the most recent actions and updates on the Board Noticeboard.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
I noticed you uploaded File:Sculpture of George Floyd.jpeg using a non-free license for both the sculpture and the photo. The licensing for the artwork is correct as we don't have freedom of panorama for 3D artworks in the United States.
However, WP:FREER states that we should use "freer" versions of non-free media when possible, and it would not violate the sculptor's copyright by releasing the photo under a free license. Will you be willing to re-license the photo?
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-05-12. Missed the previous one? See issue #678. Translations are available
Past: Wikimedia Hackathon happened on May 4. Check out the closing showcase that included some Wikidata-related projects: Etherpad (Hackaton 2025)
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Blogs
GLAM and Wikidata: The "GLAMorous Wikidata" Campaign: In March 2025, Wikimedia Serbia launched a local thematic campaign called GLAMurous Wikidata, focused on improving data about cultural and heritage institutions on Wikidata.
Wikidata and Research: The programme for the “Wikidata and Research” conference is now available online. Scheduled for 5–6 June 2025 at the University of Florence, this event is convened by a volunteer Scientific Committee in collaboration with Wikimedia Italia and the University of Florence.
Wdactle game -- is a Wikidata version of Redactle! It's a game where you are shown a Wikidata Item with all labels and words redacted and have to figure out what it is. Guessing a word reveals all the places where it is used. Built by Luca Werkmeister during the Wikimedia Hackathon 2025.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
⚠️ Wikidata Query Service graph split: As you know Wikidata Query Service was no longer able to handle the complete set of data Wikidata has. To address this the graph in Wikidata Query Service has now been split into a main graph (that continues to be at query.wikidata.org) and a scholarly graph (that is at query-scholarly.wikidata.org). For more details please see Wikidata:SPARQL query service/WDQS graph split.
Join the Wikidata:Impact stories global campiagn. We're celebrating the amazing Wikidata community - editors, developers, librarians, and creators - and inviting you to share how Wikidata is used. Your story can inspire others and grow the community. Submit yours or nominate a cool project by June 6.
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
related video (less fitting video, used only because a better alternative is not available. If an appropriate video of the item is available, use P10 instead. Value should not be a generic placeholder.)
cosplay of (character(s) that are cosplayed in this image or video)
Showcase Lexemes: Projektion (L494436) - German noun (pro-yek-tsi̯oːn) that can mean "projection", "image display", or "defence mechanism in Psychoanalysis"
Development
mul language code: We are fixing an issue where Items can't be found by their mul language label or alias (phab:T392058)
Wikibase REST API: We are working on phrase matching for the simple search (phab:T389011)
Dark mode: We fixed a color contrast bug with the entity selector when making new statements (phab:T393641)
Ontology: We’re working on an updated, more complete version of the wikibase.owl ontology file (phab:T371752)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
The "Get shortened URL" link on the sidebar now includes a QR code. Wikimedia site users can now use it by scanning or downloading it to quickly share and access shared content from Wikimedia sites, conveniently.
Updates for editors
The Wikimedia Foundation is working on a system called Edge Uniques, which will enable A/B testing, help protect against distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks), and make it easier to understand how many visitors the Wikimedia sites have. This is to help more efficiently build tools which help readers, and make it easier for readers to find what they are looking for. Tech News has previously written about this. The deployment will be gradual. Some might see the Edge Uniques cookie the week of 19 May. You can discuss this on the talk page.
Starting May 19, 2025, Event organisers in wikis with the CampaignEvents extension enabled can use Event Registration in the project namespace (e.g., Wikipedia namespace, Wikidata namespace). With this change, communities don't need admins to use the feature. However, wikis that don't want this change can remove and add the permitted namespaces at Special:CommunityConfiguration/CampaignEvents.
The Wikipedia project now has a Wikipedia in Nupe (w:nup:). This is a language primarily spoken in the North Central region of Nigeria. Speakers of this language are invited to contribute to new Wikipedia.
Developers can now access pre-parsed Dutch Wikipedia, amongst others (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese) through the Structured Contents snapshots (beta). The content includes parsed Wikipedia abstracts, descriptions, main images, infoboxes, article sections, and references.
The /page/data-parsoid REST API endpoint is no longer in use and will be deprecated. It is scheduled to be turned off on June 7, 2025.
The IPv6 support is a newly introduced Cloud virtual network that significantly boosts Wikimedia platforms' scalability, security, and readiness for the future. If you are a technical contributor eager to learn more, check out this blog post for an in-depth look at the journey to IPv6.
The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes Issue 68, March–April 2025
In this issue we highlight two resource renewals, #EveryBookItsReader, a note about Phabricator, and, as always, a roundup of news and community items related to libraries and digital knowledge.
The Apollo Abort Guidance System (AGS, also known as Abort Guidance Section) was a backup computer system providing an abort capability in the event of failure of the Lunar Module's primary guidance system (Apollo PGNCS) during descent, ascent or rendezvous. As an abort system, it did not support guidance for a lunar landing.
It was the first navigation system to use a strapdown Inertial Measurement Unit rather than a gimbaled gyrostabilized IMU (as used by PGNCS). Although not as accurate as the gimbaled IMU, it provided satisfactory accuracy with the help of the optical telescope and rendezvous radar. It was also lighter and smaller in size.
Image of the month
Falcon 9 Full Thrust
Starting development in 2014, the Falcon 9 Full Thrust is a variant of the Falcon 9 that is the first orbital rocket to have a first stage successfully land vertically after launch. The stage shown here is from the April 2016 SpaceX CRS-8 mission, after landing on the autonomous spaceport drone shipOf Course I Still Love You.
Since March 2025, four new high-importance, two new mid-importance, twenty new low-importance, and two new NA-importance articles have been created. Four unknown-importance articles have been removed, for a total of 24 new articles. One article has been promoted to Featured Article status. There are also five more B-class articles, eighteen more C-class articles, eleven more Start-class articles, six fewer Stub-class articles, and six more lists.
Special thanks to Neopeius for significantly working on some of the Timeline of spaceflight articles (specifically 1953, 54, 55, and most recently 56). Thanks also to Sotakarhu for table work in the latter.
Discuss & propose changes to The Downlink at The Downlink talk page. To unsubscribe from the newsletter remove your name from the Mailing list.
Newsletter contributors: Ships&Space
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-05-19. Missed the previous one? See issue #679. Help with Translations.
On Thursday, 22 May 2025, from 10:00 to 12:00 (CEST), digiS Berlin will offer an online workshop titled "Wikidata for GLAMs." The event is free, open to all, and conducted in German. More information and registration is here.
Diff Blog: Spotlight on Wikidata in the WikiLearn newsletter: WikiLearn's May 2025 update highlights how its online courses, including Wikidata 101, are effectively helping Wikimedians develop key skills, reduce edit reversion rates, and foster engagement across multiple language communities.
The Meaning Behind Our Place Names - The Open Etymology Map uses Wikidata-linked etymology tags in OpenStreetMap to reveal the origins of place names, offering an interactive way to explore the historical and linguistic roots of streets, towns, and landmarks
Papers
Preprint: Scholia Chemistry: access to chemistry in Wikidata - This study explores Wikidata's role in chemistry, highlighting how thousands of new chemicals were added, how new properties and database links enhance chemical representation, and how Scholia
Making an Under-Resourced Language Available on the Wikidata Knowledge Graph: Quechua Language By Huaman et. al., (2025) - This study integrates Quechua lexical data into Wikidata, adding 1,591 lexemes along with senses, forms, and pronunciation audio, demonstrating how Wikidata can support under-resourced languages in AI-driven Knowledge Graphs to promote linguistic diversity and inclusivity.
Knowledge-Based Aerospace Engineering - A Systematic Literature Review By Wittenborg et al., (2025) - This study systematically reviews Knowledge-Based Aerospace Engineering, analyzing over 1,000 articles, constructing a knowledge graph mapped to Wikidata, and demonstrating how structured, semantic-based approaches can enhance aerospace design, collaboration, and sustainable aviation
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
related video (less fitting video, used only because a better alternative is not available. If an appropriate video of the item is available, use P10 instead. Value should not be a generic placeholder.)
cosplay of (character(s) that are cosplayed in this image or video)
Reason for no value (qualifier property to be used with statements having the object "no value", given to provide a reason for "no value")
over (base field of this vector space, base ring of this module, pair of base rings for this bimodule, base monoidal category of this enriched category, etc.)
has WikiProject (WikiProject which has this topic as its main subject)
mixing engineer (person responsible for mixing the different sonic elements of a piece of recorded music into a final version of a track)
normally caused by (item that normally causes this effect, but that is not necessarily the cause here)
UI: We are putting the finishing touches on the new search box that will make it easier to search for Properties, Lexemes and EntitySchemas as well (phab:T321543)
Dark mode: We fixed the last known issues and are getting ready to roll it out
Mobile statement editing: We are refining prototypes for testing and started technical investigations
Wikibase REST API: We are continuing the work on simple search, focusing on phrase matching now (phab:T389011)
Query Service: We are working on a small experiment to show a notification for simple queries that are better run on other APIs (phab:T391264)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
The Editing Team and the Machine Learning Team are working on a new check for newcomers: Peacock check. Using a prediction model, this check will encourage editors to improve the tone of their edits, using artificial intelligence. We invite volunteers to review the first version of the Peacock language model for the following languages: Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Japanese. Users from these wikis interested in reviewing this model are invited to sign up at MediaWiki.org. The deadline to sign up is on May 23, which will be the start date of the test.
Updates for editors
From May 20, 2025, oversighters and checkusers will need to have their accounts secured with two-factor authentication (2FA) to be able to use their advanced rights. All users who belong to these two groups and do not have 2FA enabled have been informed. In the future, this requirement may be extended to other users with advanced rights. Learn more.
Multiblocks will begin mass deployment by the end of the month: all non-Wikipedia projects plus Catalan Wikipedia will adopt Multiblocks in the week of May 26, while all other Wikipedias will adopt it in the week of June 2. Please contact the team if you have concerns. Administrators can test the new user interface now on your own wiki by browsing to Special:Block?usecodex=1, and can test the full multiblocks functionality on testwiki. Multiblocks is the feature that makes it possible for administrators to impose different types of blocks on the same user at the same time. See the help page for more information. [65]
Later this week, the Special:SpecialPages listing of almost all special pages will be updated with a new design. This page has been redesigned to improve the user experience in a few ways, including: The ability to search for names and aliases of the special pages, sorting, more visible marking of restricted special pages, and a more mobile-friendly look. The new version can be previewed at Beta Cluster now, and feedback shared in the task. [66]
The Chart extension is being enabled on more wikis. For a detailed list of when the extension will be enabled on your wiki, please read the deployment timeline.
Wikifunctions will be deployed on May 27 on five Wiktionaries: Hausa, Igbo, Bengali, Malayalam, and Dhivehi/Maldivian. This is the second batch of deployment planned for the project. After deployment, the projects will be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them in their pages. A function is something that takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, such as adding up two numbers, converting miles into metres, calculating how much time has passed since an event, or declining a word into a case. Wikifunctions will allow users to do that through a simple call of a stable and global function, rather than via a local template.
Later this week, the Wikimedia Foundation will publish a hub for experiments. This is to showcase and get user feedback on product experiments. The experiments help the Wikimedia movement understand new users, how they interact with the internet and how it could affect the Wikimedia movement. Some examples are generated video, the Wikipedia Roblox speedrun game and the Discord bot.
View all 29 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a bug with creating an account using the API, which has now been fixed. [67]
Updates for technical contributors
Gadgets and user scripts that interact with Special:Block may need to be updated to work with the new manage blocks interface. Please review the developer guide for more information. If you need help or are unable to adapt your script to the new interface, please let the team know on the talk page. [68]
The mw.title object allows you to get information about a specific wiki page in the Lua programming language. Starting this week, a new property will be added to the object, named isDisambiguationPage. This property allows you to check if a page is a disambiguation page, without the need to write a custom function. [69]
User script developers can use a new reverse proxy tool to load javascript and css from gitlab.wikimedia.org with mw.loader.load. The tool's author hopes this will enable collaborative development workflows for user scripts including linting, unit tests, code generation, and code review on gitlab.wikimedia.org without a separate copy-and-paste step to publish scripts to a Wikimedia wiki for integration and acceptance testing. See Tool:Gitlab-content on Wikitech for more information.
The 12th edition of Wiki Workshop 2025, a forum that brings together researchers that explore all aspects of Wikimedia projects, will be held virtually on 21-22 May. Researchers can register now.
Content Translation: A decade of consistent improvements to the Content Translation tool yields over two million Wikipedia articles.
Charts Extension: After successfully deploying the extension on Italian, Swedish, and Hebrew Wikipedia, we are moving forward with the next phase of deployment. Please consult our page to discover when the new Charts extension will be deployed on your wiki.
Tech News: The “Get shortened URL” link on the sidebar now includes a QR code. Wikimedia site users can now use it by scanning or downloading it to quickly share and access shared content from Wikimedia sites, conveniently. More updates from Tech News week 19 and 20.
Topical Lists: Read about the important role of topical lists in supporting campaigns and editing, as well as strategies for the future development, implementation, and sustainment of list-building support.
Two-factor Authentication: From May 20, 2025, oversighters and checkusers will need to have their accounts secured with two-factor authentication (2FA) to be able to use their advanced rights. In the future, this requirement may be extended to other users with advanced rights. Read the announcement.
Mobile Apps: The iOS app team is experimenting with an "Activity Tab" on Turkish, Spanish, French, and Chinese Wikipedias to see if inviting new editors to add images through Suggested Edits increases engagement. This insight will guide future improvements to the app experience.
Learning Clinic: The next Let's Connect Learning Clinic will be about "Communication and Cultural Sensitivity in Conflict Resolution - Best practices (Part 2)" and will take place on May 27 at 13:00 UTC.
UCoC Updates: The Universal Code of Conduct 2025 annual review concluded, with community voting approving the proposed changes to the UCoC Enforcement Guidelines and U4C Charter.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
A community-wide discussion about a very delicate issue for the development of Abstract Wikipedia is now open on Meta: where to store the abstract content that will be developed through functions from Wikifunctions and data from Wikidata. The discussion is open until June 12 at Abstract Wikipedia/Location of Abstract Content, and every opinion is welcomed. The decision will be made and communicated after the consultation period by the Foundation.
Updates for editors
Since last week, on all wikis except the largest 20, people using the mobile visual editor will have additional tools in the menu bar, accessed using the new + toolbar button. To start, the new menu will include options to add: citations, hieroglyphs, and code blocks. Deployment to the remaining wikis is scheduled to happen in June.
The #ifexist parser function will no longer register a link to its target page. This will improve the usefulness of Special:WantedPages, which will eventually only list pages that are the target of an actual red link. This change will happen gradually as the source pages are updated. [70]
This week, the Moderator Tools team will launch a new filter to Recent Changes, starting at Indonesian Wikipedia. This new filter highlights edits that are likely to be reverted. The goal is to help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic edits. Other wikis will benefit from this filter in the future.
Upon clicking an empty search bar, logged-out users will see suggestions of articles for further reading. The feature will be available on both desktop and mobile. Readers of Catalan, Hebrew, and Italian Wikipedias and some sister projects will receive the change between May 21 and mid-June. Readers of other wikis will receive the change later. The goal is to encourage users to read the wikis more. Learn more.
Some users of the Wikipedia Android app can use a new feature for readers, WikiGames, a daily trivia game based on real historical events. The release has started as an A/B test, available to 50% of users in the following languages: English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Turkish.
The Newsletter extension that is available on MediaWiki.org allows the creation of various newsletters for global users. The extension can now publish new issues as section links on an existing page, instead of requiring a new page for each issue. [71]
The previously deprecated ipblocks views in Wiki Replicas will be removed in the beginning of June. Users are encouraged to query the new block and block_target views instead.
Drafts that go unedited for six months are eligible for deletion, in accordance with our draftspace policy, and this one has been nominated for deletion. If you plan on working on it further, or editing it to address the issues raised if it was declined, simply edit the submission, and remove the {{db-afc}}, {{db-draft}}, or {{db-g13}} code.
If your submission has already been deleted by the time you read this, you can request its undeletion by following the instructions here. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the draft so you can continue to work on it.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-05-27. Missed the previous one? See issue #680. Help with Translations.
AI in Data Management and Analysis By Haber et al., (2025) – This paper explores how AI streamlines academic data tasks like cleaning and analysis, whike tools like Google DataPrep, Airtable and Wikidata help researchers, but human oversight is key to maintaining accuracy and ethics in research.
Wikidata Toolkit The Wikidata Toolkit is an open-source Java library for using data from Wikidata and other Wikibase sites. Its main goal is to make it easy for external developers to take advantage of this data in their own applications.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
A discussion on Meta about a very delicate issue for the development of Abstract Wikipedia is now open: where to store the abstract content that will be developed through functions from Wikifunctions and data from Wikidata. Some of the hypothesis involve Wikidata. You can read the various hypothesis and have your say at Abstract Wikipedia/Location of Abstract Content.
Who are the most overlooked and interesting Women in Red? We've no idea, but we're putting together our list of the 100 most interesting ex-Women in Red. We are creating the list to celebrate 10 years of Women in Red and we hope to present it at Wikimania. We are ignoring the obvious, so do you have a name or subject we should consider? Can you suggest a DYK style hook? If you are shy about editing that page, you are welcome to add ideas and comments on the talk page.
Every language Wikipedia has its own policies regarding notability and reliable sources. Before translating an article from one language Wikipedia into English Wikipedia, research the subject and verify that the translated article will meet English Wikipedia's policy requirements.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-06-02. Missed the previous one? See issue #681. Help with Translations.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot: Wikidata Translation Bot - task/s: Automate translation of Item Labels and Descriptions across supported languages and submit them using the official Wikidata API.
New Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group project series! We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group event series on the Wikidata Graph Split project. Our first event will include guests from the Wikidata Search team to discuss the recent graph split project. Join us Tuesday, June 3, 2025 at 9am PT/ 12pm ET/ 16:00 UTC / 6pm CEST (Time zone converter). Please see our project page for more information and Zoom links.
Wikidata Qrank is a ranking signal for Wikidata entities. It gets computed by aggregating page view statistics for Wikipedia, Wikitravel, Wikibooks, Wikispecies and other Wikimedia projects. For example, according to the QRank signal, the fictional character Pippi Longstocking ranks lower than Harry Potter, but still much higher than the obscure Äffle & Pferdle.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Should I watch this? - Enter a film title or IMDb ID to get a recommendation, uses data from Wikidata.
Job Openings - want to help shape the future of Wikidata or Wikibase?
Wikibase REST API: We are continuing the work on integrating simple search, specifically phrase matching (phab:T389011)
Query Service: We are working on an experiment to add a small dialog to inform people about alternative access methods for very simple queries that don't require SPARQL (phab:T391261)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
The Chart extension is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. Editors can use this new extension to create interactive data visualizations like bar, line, area, and pie charts. Charts are designed to replace many of the uses of the legacy Graph extension.
Updates for editors
It is now easier to configure automatic citations for your wiki within the visual editor's citation generator. Administrators can now set a default template by using the _default key in the local MediaWiki:Citoid-template-type-map.json page (example diff). Setting this default will also help to future-proof your existing configurations when new item types are added in the future. You can still set templates for individual item types as they will be preferred to the default template. [72]
Starting the week of June 2, bots logging in using action=login or action=clientlogin will fail more often. This is because of stronger protections against suspicious logins. Bots using bot passwords or using a loginless authentication method such as OAuth are not affected. If your bot is not using one of those, you should update it; using action=login without a bot password was deprecated in 2016. For most bots, this only requires changing what password the bot uses. [73]
From this week, Wikimedia wikis will allow ES2017 features in JavaScript code for official code, gadgets, and user scripts. The most visible feature of ES2017 is async/await syntax, allowing for easier-to-read code. Until this week, the platform only allowed up to ES2016, and a few months before that, up to ES2015. [74]
Scholarship applications to participate in the GLAM Wiki Conference 2025 are now open. The conference will take place from 30 October to 1 November, in Lisbon, Portugal. GLAM contributors who lack the means to support their participation can apply here. Scholarship applications close on June 7th.
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on 16 May. Please help translate.
Upcoming and current events and conversations Let's Talk continues
Wikimania: Register now to attend Wikimania Nairobi! Registration for the in-person event will be open until July 13 or while places remain. For joining virtually, you will be able to register at any time.
Let's Connect: The next Let's Connect Learning Clinic will focus on "1Lib1Ref: Tools, Tactics and Innovation". The session will take place on June 5 at 15:00 UTC.
Tech News: The Wikimedia Foundation will publish a hub for experiments to showcase and get user feedback on product experiments; The Moderator Tools team will launch a new filter to Recent Changes, starting at Indonesian Wikipedia. The goal is to help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic edits. More updates from Tech News week 21 and 22.
Abstract Wikipedia: A community-wide discussion for the development of Abstract Wikipedia is now open on Meta: where to store the abstract content that will be developed through functions from Wikifunctions and data from Wikidata. The discussion is open until June 12 at Abstract Wikipedia/Location of Abstract Content, and every opinion is welcomed.
Temporary accounts: Admins, bureaucrats, or stewards will be manually granting access to temporary account IP addresses to users without certain extended rights. Previously, these users were gaining this right automatically. The decision to change this was made by the Trust and Safety Product team after discussing with almost 20 large Wikipedia communities and Meta-Wiki. See the full message about the change. In addition, the team is finishing work which unblocks rollouts on large wikis. A series of deployments will be happening in June. See the latest project update to learn about the satisfaction survey, related changes to features and tools, and more.
Wikifunctions: Wikifunctions is deployed on five Wiktionaries: Hausa, Igbo, Bengali, Malayalam, and Dhivehi/Maldivian. Users of the five projects are now allowed to call on Wikifunctions' functions freely from their user interface.
WikiGames: A daily trivia game called WikiGames is coming to the Wikipedia Android app. It invites users to test their knowledge by guessing which historical event happened first based on real events from Wikipedia's "On this day" content. The game's goal is to help new audiences discover a preferred destination for discovering, engaging, and building encyclopedic content. It has been gradually rolled out as an A/B test to 50% of users in English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Turkish.
CampaignEvents extension: Two new features Invitation Lists and Collaboration List that allow organizers to promote events and WikiProjects on the wikis are now available.
WikiLearn: Discover how online learning is helping develop Wikidata skills and the new courses coming up this quarter on WikiLearn News May 2025 edition.
Youth Conference: Young Wikimedians gathered in Prague for the first-ever Youth Conference, created for young people and by young people.
Accessibility: In celebration of Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2025, we would like to look back together and highlight recent improvements and progress to ensure that the Wikimedia projects are more accessible for everyone.
Mandatory 2FA: Checkusers and oversighters will need to have two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled, otherwise they won't be able to use their tools. In the future, this requirement may apply to more user right groups. This is to increase the security of user accounts. See the full message.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our virtual WikiWednesday Salon. This month's WikiWednesday will be fully online and focused on Wikimedia global trends, neutral point of view, and the Wiki Loves Pride campaign for Pride Month. No experience of anything at all is required. All are welcome!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
The Trust and Safety Product team is finalizing work needed to roll out temporary accounts on large Wikipedias later this month. The team has worked with stewards and other users with extended rights to predict and address many use cases that may arise on larger wikis, so that community members can continue to effectively moderate and patrol temporary accounts. This will be the second of three phases of deployment – the last one will take place in September at the earliest. For more information about the recent developments on the project, see this update. If you have any comments or questions, write on the talk page, and join a CEE Catch Up this Tuesday.
Updates for editors
The watchlist expiry feature allows editors to watch pages for a limited period of time. After that period, the page is automatically removed from your watchlist. Starting this week, you can set a preference for the default period of time to watch pages. The preferences also allow you to set different default watch periods for editing existing pages, pages you create, and when using rollback. [75]
Example of a talk page with the new design, in French.
The appearance of talk pages will change at almost all Wikipedias (some have already received this design change, a few will get these changes later). You can read details about the changes on Diff. It is possible to opt out of these changes in user preferences ("Show discussion activity"). [76][77]
Users with specific extended rights (including administrators, bureaucrats, checkusers, oversighters, and stewards) can now have IP addresses of all temporary accounts revealed automatically during time-limited periods where they need to combat high-speed account-hopping vandalism. This feature was requested by stewards. [78]
This week, the Moderator Tools and Machine Learning teams will continue the rollout of a new filter to Recent Changes, releasing it to several more Wikipedias. This filter utilizes the Revert Risk model, which was created by the Research team, to highlight edits that are likely to be reverted and help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic contributions. The feature will be rolled out to the following Wikipedias: Afrikaans Wikipedia, Belarusian Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, Welsh Wikipedia, Hawaiian Wikipedia, Icelandic Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Simple English Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia. The rollout will continue in the coming weeks to include the rest of the Wikipedias in this project. [79]
AbuseFilter editors active on Meta-Wiki and large Wikipedias are kindly asked to update AbuseFilter to make it compatible with temporary accounts. A link to the instructions and the private lists of filters needing verification are available on Phabricator.
Lua modules now have access to the name of a page's associated thumbnail image, and on some wikis to the WikiProject assessment information. This is possible using two new properties on mw.title objects, named pageImage and pageAssessments. [80][81]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-06-10. Missed the previous one? See issue #682. Help with Translations.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: Coinhoe - RfP scheduled to end after 10 June 2025 23:49 (UTC)
Events
Upcoming events: New Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group project series! We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group event series on the Wikidata Graph Split project. Our second event will be a conversation with Daniel Mietchen and Lane Rasberry about Scholia, the Wikidata frontend which generates and presents scholarly profiles based on WikiCite content. They'll speak to Scholia's current state and roadmap, with consideration for the recent Wikidata graph split. Tuesday, June 10, 2025 at 9am PT/ 12pm ET/ 16:00 UTC / 6pm CEST. More info and Zoom links: project page.
GLAM:Memory of the World Report: Hannah Drummen at UNESCO, alongside data expert Martin, has completed a structured dataset of 496 International Register items, ready for bulk upload to Wikidata in June, with an aim to enhance accessibility and define best practices for future updates.
Wikidata QID updates to BHL catalogue: The BHL Lead Developer, Mike Lichtenberg, is ensuring periodic Wikidata Qid refreshes in the BHL Catalogue, with the working group advising a downloadable post-refresh report for OpenRefine integration, to be sent to the BHL Metacat group for reconciliation by Siobhan or other Wikidata editors.
Wikidata training & Datathon in Indonesia: Wikimedia Indonesia hosts WikiLatih Wikidata training to enhance skills in editing Indonesian cultural heritage data on Wikidata, while Datathon challenges participants to make the most edits on museum-related topics in Indonesia.
Papers
Wikidata for Botanists: Benefits of collaborating and sharing Linked Open Data By von Mering et al., (2025) - This paper explores Wikidata as a multilingual open knowledge base for botany, highlighting its role in connecting botanical information across sources, and calling on the botanical community to enhance its content.
CS-KG 2.0: A Large-scale Knowledge Graph of Computer Science By Dessí et al., (2025) - This paper introduces CS-KG 2.0, an advanced AI-powered knowledge graph built from 15 million research papers, designed to enhance scientific exploration by structuring and interconnecting vast amounts of computer science literature.
Videos
Using the Wiki List tool - GoogleSheet with formulae for retrieving Wikidata values and writing QuickStatements commands.
Wikidata Phonemes This is the web application developed specifically for Wikidata IOLab. In here you can add phonemes to a whole bunch of languages, basing your work on the work that the brazilian students of their national olympiad did while editing Wikipedia.
Should I watch this? is a tool that helps users decide whether a movie or show is worth watching.
WikiProject highlights: Names/Belarusian - This WikiProject aims to add structured and linguistic data to Wikidata to enable the study of people's names across all time periods, regions, and languages.
Mobile editing of statements: We are doing initial development focusing on technical investigations and basic UI elements (phab:T394292, phab:T394886)
Lexemes: We are looking into a rare error when trying to do undo certain Lexeme edits (phab:T392372)
Watchlist/Recent changes on Wikipedia: We continued working on showing labels instead of IDs in the edit summaries of Wikidata changes that are shown in the watchlist and recent changes of Wikipedia and co (phab:T388685)
Wikibase REST API: Finishing touches on simple search (phab:T383126)
Query Service UI: Added experimental popup to point people running very simple queries to other available access methods (phab:T391264)
Odyssey was launched April 7, 2001, on a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, and reached Mars orbit on October 24, 2001, at 02:30 UTC (October 23, 19:30 PDT, 22:30 EDT). As of March 2025, it is still collecting data, and is estimated to have enough propellant to function until the end of 2025. It currently holds the record for the longest-surviving continually active spacecraft in orbit around a planet other than Earth, ahead of the Pioneer Venus Orbiter (served 14 years) and the Mars Express (serving over 20 years), at 23 years, 9 months and 7 days. As of October 2019[update] it is in a polar orbit around Mars with a semi-major axis of about 3,800 km or 2,400 miles.
Since April 2025, three new mid-importance, nine new low-importance, and three new unknown-importance articles have been created, for a total of 15 new articles. There is also one less B-class article, 14 more C-class articles, six more Start-class articles, four less Stub-class articles, and three more lists.
Discuss & propose changes to The Downlink at The Downlink talk page. To unsubscribe from the newsletter remove your name from the Mailing list.
Newsletter contributors: Ships&Space
Hello. You're invited to participate in The World Destubathon. We're aiming to destub a lot of articles and also improve longer stale articles. It will be held from Monday June 16 - Sunday July 13. There is over $3300 going into it, with $500 the top prize. If you are interested in winning something to save you money in buying books for future content, or just see it as a good editathon opportunity to see a lot of articles improved for subjects which interest you, sign up on the page in the participants section if interested. Even if you can only manage a few articles they would be very much appreciated and help towards making the content produced as diverse and broad as possible!♦ Dr. Blofeld14:13, 15 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
DecomissionedAircraftMap (see tool below) - The Decommissioned Aircraft Map project uses Wikidata to enhance its mapping of historic aircraft by pulling images from linked Wikidata entries. Users can contribute by adding or correcting Wikidata tags on OpenStreetMap, ensuring accurate representation of aircraft locations and visuals. By Watmildon.
DecomissionedAircraftMap (as a demonstration of the power of OpenStreetMap into Wikidata): pulls geodata for displayed aircraft from OpenStreetMap and generates thumbnails from linked Wikidata entries.
Query split tester (Beta): webtool to see the impact on the graph split on your SPARQL query.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Nominations for the Coolest Tools Award 2025 are open. Nominate your favorite tool! Nominations are due by the 25th of this month already.
Newest WikiProjects: EMCO Wikidata CoP - EMCO promotes the discovery and use of the world’s knowledge by supporting metadata producers in library and other cultural heritage communities.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
You can nominate your favorite tools for the sixth edition of the Coolest Tool Award. Nominations are anonymous and will be open until June 25. You can re-use the survey to nominate multiple tools.
Foundation staff and technical volunteers use Wikimedia APIs to build the tools, applications, features, and integrations that enhance user experiences. Over the coming years, the MediaWiki Interfaces team will be investing in Wikimedia web (HTTP) APIs to better serve technical volunteer needs and protect Wikimedia infrastructure from potential abuse. You can read more about their plans to evolve the APIs in this Techblog post.
In February, Mentorship was successfully rolled out to 100% of newcomers on English Wikipedia. Following this milestone, we collaborated with Spanish Wikipedia to expand Mentorship coverage to 70% of new accounts, with plans to reach 85% soon unless concerns are raised by mentors. (T394867)
Some links types were removed to align with recommendations written in the English Wikipedia Manual of Style (T390683)
Allowing communities to limit “Add a Link” to newcomers (T393771)
The model used to suggest the links was improved to ease its training (T388258)
English Wikipedia rollout and A/B test: We increased the rollout to 20% of newcomers, with analysis underway. Preliminary data suggests this feature makes new account holders more likely to complete an unreverted edit. (T386029, T382603)
Surfacing Structured Tasks: An experiment where we show “add a link” suggestions to newly registered users while they are reading an article is running on pilot wikis (French, Persian, Indonesian, Portuguese, Egyptian Arabic). Initial results are under analysis. (T386029)
“Get Started” notification: Engineering is in progress for a new notification (Echo/email) to encourage editing among newcomers with zero edits. Early research shows this type of nudge is effective. (T392256)
Confirmation email: We are exploring ways to simplify and improve the initial account confirmation email newly registered users receive. (T215665)
The Wikimedia Foundation’s 2025–2026 Annual Plan is taking shape. The Growth and Editing teams will focus on the Contributor Experiences (WE1) objective, with a focus on increasing constructive edits by editors with fewer than 100 cumulative contributions.
We value your insights and ideas! If you would like to participate in a discussion, share feedback, or pilot new features, please reach out on the relevant Phabricator tasks or at our talk page, in any language.
Tech News: The Chart extension is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. Editors can use this new extension to create interactive data visualizations like bar, line, area, and pie charts. The Trust and Safety Product team is finalizing work needed to roll out temporary accounts on large Wikipedias. More updates from Tech News week 23 and 24.
New Engagement Experiments: We're testing out WikiRun, a fun game that lets you race through Wikipedia by clicking from one article to another, aiming to reach a target page in as few steps and in as little time as possible! It's an experiment to explore new ways of engaging readers. Give it a try and let us know what you think on the talk page!
WikiCelebrate: How one librarian brought Wikipedia into the classroom and beyond: this month we celebrate Loretta.
Wikimedia Research Showcase: The next showcase will center around the theme of "Ensuring Content Integrity on Wikipedia" and will take place on June 18 at 16:30 UTC.
Resource Support: Resource Support pilot project is now open to requests. This is a pilot project which aims to support Wikipedia content editors in obtaining resources that they need to improve content on Wikipedia.
Global Advocacy: The Global Advocacy team will be representing the Wikimedia Foundation at several events in June and July – including hosting an edit-a-thon during UN Open Source week and running a booth at the Internet Governance Forum.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Hello! This is Luiysia again. Hope everyone has been having a great summer! Here are the details for our July bimonthly meetup, which will be a Wiknic.
The meetup will start at Welles Park, in the Ravenswood neighborhood, at 2 PM on July 13.
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If the page has already been deleted, you can request it be undeleted so you can continue working on it.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-06-23. Missed the previous one? See issue #684.
Events
Join us for the third LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group event on the Wikidata Graph Split project, Tuesday, June 24 at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 16:00 UTC / 6pm CEST. We’ll share updates on the Query Service, tools, and SPARQL learning resources. Stanford researchers Shicheng Liu and Sina Jandaghi Semnani will present their Spinach Wikidata Agent, which translates complex questions into SPARQL queries Project page
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Presentations
Slides of the panelMediaWiki-based tools and services in Digital Humanities workflows, part of the DARIAH-EU Annual Event 2025 in Göttingen: (the panel was about Wikibase instances, including Wikidata)
FEMIber: a digital humanities tool that uses structured data aligned with Wikidata principles to document and analyze how women are represented in medieval Iberian chronicles.
Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Personal Collections - The WikiProject Personal Collections aims to develop standardized terms, multilingual ontologies, and best practices for consistently describing personal collections and archives on Wikidata.
Showcase Lexemes: газ (L183915) - Russian noun (ɡas) meaning "gas (physical state)", "natural gas", or "accelerator pedal"
Development
Query Service: It is now possible to download query results in Wikidata Query Service that include coordinates as GeoJSON (KML & GPX should also be available soon). Thanks to Atom.oil.2 for the patch. (phab:T216601)
Wikidata integration in Wikipedia and co: We are continuing the work on improving how Wikidata changes show up in watchlist and recent changes, specifically showing labels instead of IDs in the future. (phab:T388685)
Search: We enabled the new search box that makes it easier to search in Properties, Lexemes and EntitySchemas as well. We are working on minor fixes based on feedback.
Mobile statement editing: We are working on showing the first statements in the new way - mostly tech demo and nothing to see yet (phab:T394886)
Federation: We are looking into measuring and better understanding queries that use SPARQL federation.
REST API: We continued working on prefix search for Items in the API (phab:T388209)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
This week, the Moderator Tools and Machine Learning teams will continue the rollout of a new filter to Recent Changes, releasing it to the third and last batch of Wikipedias. This filter utilizes the Revert Risk model, which was created by the Research team, to highlight edits that are likely to be reverted and help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic contributions. The feature will be rolled out to the following Wikipedias: Azerbaijani Wikipedia, Latin Wikipedia, Macedonian Wikipedia, Malayalam Wikipedia, Marathi Wikipedia, Norwegian Nynorsk Wikipedia, Punjabi Wikipedia, Swahili Wikipedia, Telugu Wikipedia, Tagalog Wikipedia. The rollout will continue in the coming weeks to include the rest of the Wikipedias in this project. [82]
Updates for editors
Last week, temporary accounts were rolled out on Czech, Korean, and Turkish Wikipedias. This and next week, deployments on larger Wikipedias will follow. Share your thoughts about the project. [83]
Later this week, the Editing team will release Multi Check to all Wikipedias (except English Wikipedia). This feature shows multiple Reference checks within the editing experience. This encourages users to add citations when they add multiple new paragraphs to a Wikipedia article. This feature was previously available as an A/B test. The test shows that users who are shown multiple checks are 1.3 times more likely to add a reference to their edit, and their edit is less likely to be reverted (-34.7%). [84]
A few pages need to be renamed due to software updates and to match more recent Unicode standards. All of these changes are related to title-casing changes. Approximately 71 pages and 3 files will be renamed, across 15 wikis; the complete list is in the task. The developers will rename these pages next week, and they will fix redirects and embedded file links a few minutes later via a system settings update.
View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that had caused pages to scroll upwards when text near the top was selected. [85]
Updates for technical contributors
Editors can now use Lua modules to filter and transform tabular data for use with Extension:Chart. This can be used for things like selecting a subset of rows or columns from the source data, converting between units, statistical processing, and many other useful transformations. Information on how to use transforms is available. [86]
The all_links variable in AbuseFilter is now renamed to new_links for consistency with other variables. Old usages will still continue to work. [87]
The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: the recent updates for the "Add a Link" Task, two new Newcomer Engagement Features, and updates to Community Configuration.
Statistics available via Humaniki tool. Thank you if you contributed one or more of the 1,514 articles during this period!
19 May 2025: 20.114% of EN-WP biographies are about women (2,066,280 bios; 415,618 women)
23 Jun 2025: 20.130% (2,072,236 bios; 417,132 women)
Tip of the month:
A nuanced article is more useful than a shiny pedestal. Readers can find hope in your subject's survival or achievements, but they can also learn from your subject's mistakes and limitations.
Wikidata for Jewish Studies, a hands-on Wikidata workshop at the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz from September 8-9, 2025. (Registration by July 18)
Visualizing Knowledge - how Indonesians turn Wikidata into stories that matter. This article details the efforts and winners of a WM Indonesia organised 30-day competition to create cool visualizations powered through Wikidata.
User:Jon Harald Søby/senseItemLabel.js What it does is that when you add a P5137 statement in a lexeme, it will let you add the lemma as a label to the item in one click, if the item doesn't have a label in that language yet, or if the label is different (very useful for case differences, for instance)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The Wikidata Ontology Course has finished its course sessions. The slides for all sessions of the course are available on the course page. Part of participating in the course was to set up a project related to the Wikidata Ontology. Current information on the projects, many of which are continuing after the end of the course is now available. If you are interested in one or more of the projects please follow the project, add something to its discussion page, or contribute to it.
PhD Position in Digital History at the University of Luxembourg is seeking someone with experience in Wikibase and Linked Open Data.
defining Prolog formula (Prolog rule expressing the intended logical behavior of a property, for use in ontology formalization and rule-based reasoning.)
Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Personal Collections - The WikiProject Personal Collections aims to develop structured, multilingual standards and best practices for describing personal collections and archives on Wikidata.
Wikibase REST API: We continued working on Item prefix search (phab:T388209) and started working on stemming support (phab:T397605)
Integration in Wikipedia and co: The improved edit summaries are now live on the first wikis (ca, uk, he). We are now showing the labels for linked entities instead of just their IDs (phab:T388685)
Mobile statement editing: We are continuing working on the basics of showing statements in the new way - nothing useful to see yet (phab:T394886)
Hello and welcome to the June 2025 newsletter, a quarterly-ish digest of Guild activities since April. Don't forget you can unsubscribe at any time; see below.
Hall of Fame: Congratulations to Dhtwiki for their well-deserved addition to the Hall of Fame last month, and thanks to GoldRomean for the nomination.
Election news: Voting in the mid-year coordinator election ends at 23:59 on 30 June. Results will be announced at the election page.
April Blitz: 14 of the 25 editors who signed up for the April 2025 Copy Editing Blitz copy edited 92,769 words in 30 articles. Barnstars awarded are available here.
May Drive: 31 of the 54 editors who signed up for the May 2025 Backlog Elimination Drive copy edited 384,392 words in 216 articles. Barnstars awarded are here.
June Blitz: 10 of the 12 editors who signed up for the June 2025 Copy Editing Blitz copy edited 26,652 words in 13 articles. Barnstars awarded are here.
Progress report: As of 02:30, 30 June 2025 (UTC), GOCE copyeditors have completed 148 requests since 1 January, and the backlog stands at 2,270 articles.
Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators.
To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
AbuseFilter maintainers can now match against IP reputation data in AbuseFilters. IP reputation data is information about the proxies and VPNs associated with the user's IP address. This data is not shown publicly and is not generated for actions performed by registered accounts. [88]
Hidden content that is within collapsible parts of wikipages will now be revealed when someone searches the page using the web browser's "Find in page" function (Ctrl+F or ⌘F) in supporting browsers. [89][90]
A new feature, called Favourite Templates, will be deployed later this week on all projects (except English Wikipedia, which will receive the feature next week), following a piloting phase on Polish and Arabic Wikipedia, and Italian and English Wikisource. The feature will provide a better way for new and experienced contributors to recall and discover templates via the template dialog, by allowing users to put templates on a special "favourite list". The feature works with both the visual editor and the wikitext editor. The feature is a community wishlist focus area.
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that had caused some Notifications to be sent multiple times. [91]
The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes Issue 69, May–June 2025
In this issue we highlight a new partnership, Citation Watchlist and, as always, a roundup of news and community items related to libraries and digital knowledge.
Wikimedia API: The MediaWiki Interfaces team will be investing in Wikimedia web (HTTP) APIs to better serve technical volunteer needs and protect Wikimedia infrastructure from potential abuse.
Tech News: The Editing team will release Multi Check to most Wikipedias. This feature shows multiple Reference checks within the editing experience. This encourages users to add citations when they add multiple new paragraphs to a Wikipedia article. More updates from Tech News week 25 and 26.
Temporary Accounts: Temporary accounts were rolled out on ten large and medium-size Wikipedias, including Arabic, Chinese, French, Polish, Indonesian and more. Deployments on more Wikipedias will follow this week. Share your thoughts about the project.
Mobile Apps: Mobile Apps team launched A/B test of Tabbed Browsing on the iOS Wikipedia App. Users in Arabic, English, and Japanese in select regions will see the test.
WikiGames: The Android team launched Which Came First? — a fun, multilingual trivia game now available to all Android users in nine languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish). It's a new step in making Wikipedia more interactive and engaging for mobile users.
Community Wishlist: Read results of the recently closed "Wishathon", our internal hackathon organized by Community Tech to help fulfil more wishes from Community Wishlist.
CampaignEvents Extension: CampaignEvents extension has now been deployed to all Wikipedia, meaning that organizers on any language Wikipedia can now gain access to the extension features directly on that Wikipedia through the Wikipedia local admins.
A Wiki Minute Videos: We published three new 'A Wiki Minute' videos about what it takes to run Wikipedia and more topics. All videos are recorded and captioned in Arabic, German, English, French, Brazilian-Portuguese, Spanish.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Hello, Wil540 art. This is a bot-delivered message letting you know that Draft:There Skateboards, a page you created, has not been edited in at least 5 months. Drafts that have not been edited for six months may be deleted, so if you wish to retain the page, please edit it again or request that it be moved to your userspace.
If the page has already been deleted, you can request it be undeleted so you can continue working on it.
Hi @Wil540 art! I'm reaching out as I noticed you've made some pages related to college basketball players.
I just made this article Madina Okot for WP:WIR (you made a page on one of her teammates). As I've not made a basketball player article before, I'm concerned my infobox might be off, and I might be missing some categories. If you have some time, would you mind having a look? Or if there is a central place that women's basketball articles can go for assistance, if you could point me there? Many thanks for any assistance you can provide here! Very best, Nayyn (talk) 19:42, 6 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
thank you so much for helping with the article! I'm really excited to see her play too! I will share it on those talk pages, thanks for sharing those. Appreciate your help here! Nayyn (talk) 06:43, 7 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-067-07. Missed the previous one? See issue #686.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
Bovlbbot - Task(s): this bot request asks for admin access (or access to deleted revisions if possible) so it can move the updater task for User:Bovlb/wd-deleted.
Andrebot 3 - Task(s): Fill in historic countries for the settlements, communes, towns and cities of Romania.
New Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group project series! Mark your calendars for our final session of our event series on the Wikidata graph split project and SPARQL skills! We will be diving into the mechanics of federated SPARQL queries and look forward to a hands-on and interactive session exploring how to use the scholarly article query service. Join us Tuesday, July 8th at 9am PT/ 12pm ET/ 16:00 UTC / 6pm CEST (Time zone converter https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1751990400). Please see our project page for more information and Zoom links.
Hackathon announced for Wikimania 2025, Nairobi. Call for Projects is now open! Includes a newcomer track for first-time participants. Add yourself to the participants list or see the resources page for further event info.
User:Kod B - ArchiveExternaLinks.js This script automatically archives external links found in the statements of Wikidata items, in order to improve source durability and reduce the risk of broken links (link rot), similar to what already exists on Wikipedia.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
What belongs where in the Wikibase Ecosystem? There is ongoing research to better understand what people are currently thinking about this and you can take part by sorting some scenarios.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
Temporary accounts have been rolled out on 18 large and medium-sized Wikipedias, including German, Japanese, French, and Chinese. Now, about 1/3 of all logged-out activity across wikis is coming from temporary accounts. Users involved in patrolling may be interested in two new documentation pages: Access to IP, explaining everything related to access to temporary account IP addresses, and Repository with a list of new gadgets and user scripts.
Updates for editors
Anyone can play an experimental new game, WikiRun, that lets you race through Wikipedia by clicking from one article to another, aiming to reach a target page in as few steps and in as little time as possible. The project's goal is to explore new ways of engaging readers. Try playing the game and let the team know what you think on the talk page.
Users of the Wikipedia Android app in some languages can now play the new trivia game. Which came first? is a simple history game where you guess which of two events happened earlier on today's date. It was previously available as an A/B test. It is now available to all users in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Turkish, and Chinese. The goal of the feature is to help engage with new generations of readers. [92]
Users of the iOS Wikipedia App in some languages may see a new tabbed browsing feature that enables you to open multiple tabs while reading. This feature makes it easier to explore related topics and switch between articles. The A/B test is currently running in Arabic, English, and Japanese in selected regions. More details are available on the Tabbed Browsing project page.
A new feature related to Template Recall and Discovery will be deployed later this week to all Wikimedia projects: a template category browser will be introduced to assist users in finding templates to put in their “favourite” list. The browser will allow users to browse a list of templates which have been organised into a given category tree. The feature has been requested by the community through the Community Wishlist.
It is now possible to access watchlist preferences from the watchlist page. Also the redundant button to edit the watchlist has been removed. [94]
As part of MediaWiki 1.44 there is now a unified built-in Notifications system that makes it easier for developers to send, manage, and customize notifications. Check out the updated documentation at Manual:Notifications, information about migration in T388663 and details on deprecated hooks in T389624.
WikidataCon 2025, the conference dedicated to Wikidata is now open for session proposals and for registration. This year's event will be held online from October 31 – November 02 and will explore on the theme of "Connecting People through Linked Open Data".
Please join us for the launch events to recognize the Wikimedia NYC 400!
Fulfilling Wikimedia NYC tradition, we'll start off the campaign with an edit-a-thon on Thursday and a Wiknic on Sunday, and will continue with Wikimedia NYC 400 events throughout the rest of this year.
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC, 16th July 2025 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Wikimania 2025 Hackathon kicks off on Tuesday, 5 August and a dedicated workspace will be available throughout the conference until Saturday, 9 August. Have a technical idea, tool, or project you want to build during the hackathon? Submit it now and start connecting with collaborators! Add your project here.
WikiCite 2025 will take place from Friday 29th to Sunday 31st of August! in Bern (Switzerland) and online! See the draft program here.
Wikidata for botanists: benefits of collaborating and sharing Linked Open Data By Sabine et al., (2025). This study explores Wikidata as an open, multilingual knowledge base that connects botanical data across sources, and urges botanists to collaboratively enrich its content to support a broad spectrum of plant science.
How To...Wikibase? - Senior Partner Manager, Christos Varvantakis has produced this set of training and educational material to get you started with Wikibase.
Tool of the week
Commons Depictions is a tool that display depictions of Wikidata items on Wikimedia Commons
Showcase Lexemes: reference (L5785) - English noun/verb (ˈɹɛf.ɹəns) meaning "source citation", "supporting document", or "relationship"
Development
Wikibase REST API: We started work on the simple Property prefix search phab:(T397838)
Mobile statement editing: We continued the work on the basics with viewing of statements (phab:T394886])
Search: Fixed a bug when pasting into the search box (phab:T397608)
Integration in Wikipedia and co:
We began research into current limits for collapsing entity usage. (Basically when an article uses more data from an Item than the configured limit then we consider all data on that Item to be used. This is done for infrastructure reasons.) We’d like to improve this to further reduce unnecessary Wikidata changes showing up on watchlist and recent changes on Wikipedia and co.
We will roll out showing labels instead of IDs in Wikidata edits in watchlist and recent changes to more wikis later this week.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Featured templates, a new feature related to Template Recall and Discovery will be deployed this week to all Wikimedia projects: With this feature, editors will be able to quickly access a list of templates that are likely to be useful. These templates will be displayed in a list, under the "featured" tab of the template discovery interface. Administrators can define the list via the Community Configuration interface. The feature fulfills a request by the community through the Community Wishlist. [95][96]
View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the request to add Malayalam fonts in the Wikisource Book Export Tool was resolved and now, the rendering of Malayalam letters in exported Wikisource books are accurate. [97]
WikiIndaba 2025 scholarship application and program submission is open until 23:59 GMT on July 20. WikiIndaba is a regional conference for African Wikimedians both on the continent and in the diaspora to unite and grow together. Submit your scholarship application and program proposal now!
WikiCon Brasil 2025 will take place on July 19-20 in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. The Brazilian community members are encouraged to register and attend!
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on June 27. Please help translate.
The Wikimania Hackathon 2025 inviting project ideas.
Upcoming and current events and conversations Let's Talk continues
Wikimania Hackathon 2025: The Wikimania Hackathon 2025 is inviting you to submit your project idea.
WikiWomen* Summit 2025: The WikiWomen* Summit 2025 will take place in a hybrid format on 5th August, the pre-conference day of Wikimania 2025. Register now.
Tech News: Temporary accounts have been rolled out on 18 large and medium-sized Wikipedias, including German, Japanese, French, and Chinese; The CampaignEvents extension has been enabled on all Wikipedias. More updates from Tech News week 27 and 28.
AbuseFilter: AbuseFilter maintainers can now match against IP reputation data in AbuseFilters. IP reputation data is information about the proxies and VPNs associated with the user’s IP address. This data is not shown publicly and is not generated for actions performed by registered accounts.
Favorite Templates: A new feature related to Template Recall and Discovery will be deployed to all Wikimedia projects: a template category browser will be introduced to assist users in finding templates to put in their “favourite” list. The browser will allow users to browse a list of templates which have been organised into a given category tree. The feature has been requested by the community through the Community Wishlist.
Wikipedia App: We have launched an A/B test of tabbed browsing in the Wikipedia iOS app. This feature allows users to open multiple articles in separate tabs, making it easier to switch between topics, explore, and return to previous reading spots. The test is currently running in Arabic, English, and Japanese in selected regions. We’re collecting feedback and plan to make the feature more widely available soon.
MediaWiki: The MediaWiki Platform team has introduced a unified Built-in Notifications system, as part of MediaWiki 1.44, that makes it easier for developers to send, manage, and customize notifications across the platform.
Advocacy: We have created The Wikipedia Test: a public policy tool and a call to action to help ensure regulators consider how new laws can negatively affect online communities and platforms that provide services and information in the public interest.
Wikimedia Research Showcase: The next showcase will center around the theme of "Examining the Impact of LLMs on Knowledge Production Communities" and will take place on July 16 at 16:30 UTC.
Administrative Update to Our Privacy Policies: Following personnel changes, we are removing the name of our former point of contact serving the European Economic Area and the UK for questions and requests related to personal data in the privacy policy and donor privacy policy.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
In accordance with our policy that Wikipedia is not for the indefinite hosting of material, the draft has been deleted. When you plan on working on it further and you wish to retrieve it, you can request its undeletion. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the submission so you can continue to work on it.
Wikimedia and Open Knowledge Conference (survey) is being planned for 2026 in Poland. This event is to focus on research carried out on or with Wikidata and Wikipedia. Your opinion is wanted! Please fill out the Google Forms survey to help the organisation committee plan. Also available in Polish and Ukrainian.
Wikimania 2025 Program is Live! This is also the time to add your Wikidata meetups. Please start marking your preferred Wikimania sessions (⭐/like) and mark to your mobile apps or calendars. If you are joining online to watch live stream and use the interactive features, please register on eventyay through wikimania.org (source)
Past: Missed the Q3 Wikidata+Wikibase office hour? You can catch up by reading the session log here: 2025-07-15 (Q3 2025)
Wikinity A tool allowing you to find (un)photographed objects, so you can take a picture of them and send it to Wikidata. The tool was created By Martin Urbanec
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The Call for Papers is now open for the Journal of Open Humanities Data special collection: "Wikidata across the Humanities: datasets, methodologies, reuse." This editorial will explore how Wikidata is transforming research and collaboration in the humanities. If you're working on a relevant project, submit your proposal here
What belongs where in the Wikibase Ecosystem? There is ongoing research to better understand what people are currently thinking about this and you can take part by sorting some scenarios.
Showcase Lexemes: Września (L1372236) - Polish proper noun (ˈvʐɛɕ.ɲa) meaning "September (month)", "town in Greater Poland", or "village in Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship"
Additional APIs: We are looking a bit more into GraphQL and what it could offer to make programmatic access to Wikidata's data better.
Wikidata integration in the Wikimedia projects: We enabled showing the labels of entities in edit summaries in recent changes and watchlist. Now you no longer have to click to get to Wikidata and check what is behind a mystery ID in an edit summary coming from Wikidata.
Mobile statement editing: We are working on formatting references, qualifiers, various data types and multiple statements for one property. We are planning to enable the new mobile UI on Beta Wikidata soon. Important: For now it is a read-only UI, as we have not started to implement editing yet, and some data types won’t have the correct appearance yet.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
The Translation Suggestions feature in the Content Translation tool now has another level of article filters added to the "... More" category. Translators who use the Suggestions feature can now select and receive article suggestions that are customized to geographical locations of their interest using the new "Regions" filter. [98]
Administrators can now limit "Add a Link" to newcomers. The "Add a Link" Structured Task helps new account holders start editing, but some communities have requested the ability to restrict it to its intended audience: newcomers. Administrators can configure this setting within the Community Configuration feature.
For AbuseFilter editors on some wikis, it is now possible to filter edits based on the RevertRisk score of the edit being attempted. It is only populated if the action being evaluated is an edit. For more information, please see the ORES/AbuseFilter variables documentation.
The Beta Cluster wikis have been moved from beta.wmflabs.org to beta.wmcloud.org. Users may need to update URLs in any tools, or in their password managers. Any related issues can be reported in the task.
WikiCite 2025 will take place from 29–31 August, both online and in-person in Bern, Switzerland. The event's goals are to reconnect communities, institutions, and individuals working with open citations, bibliographic data, and the Wikidata/Wikibase ecosystem. Registration is open and the call for proposals will be announced soon. [99]
Gaganyaan-1 (from Sanskrit: gagana, "celestial" and yāna, "craft, vehicle") will be the first uncrewed test flight of the Gaganyaan programme, with launch tentatively planned for Q4 2025.
The launch was originally scheduled for December 2020, then in December 2021, but it was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The flight plan was finally ready by April 2022 and the launch is expected to take place in early 2025, after the TV-D1, TV-D2, TV-D3 and TV-D4. It was proposed in April 2022 that the crew module should be depressurized, something kept in the final planning.
The Gaganyaan spacecraft will be launched, with the humanoid robot Vyommitra, by a Human-rated LVM 3 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre and inserted into a 170 x 408 km orbit. The circularisation maneuver will be performed at the third orbit. The landing should follow the same pattern as the TV-D1.
Image of the month
Hybrid-Propellant Rocket Fuel
Rocket engines typically use one of two types of propellant: Solid or liquid. Hybrid-propellant rockets use a combination of these two forms of fuel, and lack some of the disadvantages of both. Their specific impulse is usually between solid-propellant and liquid-propellant rockets. The image shown here is of a 3D-printed grain, designed for a small hybrid rocket engine which would be used to demonstrate rocket combustion. On the left are two helical fuel ports, on the right a de Laval nozzle.
Since May 2025, one new high-importance, two new mid-importance, ten new low-importance, four new NA-importance, and twelve new unknown-importance articles have been created, for a total of 29 new articles. There is also one fewer A-class article, one more GA-class article, six more B-class articles, 13 more C-class articles, ten more Start-class articles, seven fewer Stub-class articles, and five more lists.
Discuss & propose changes to The Downlink at The Downlink talk page. To unsubscribe from the newsletter remove your name from the Mailing list.
Newsletter contributors: Ships&Space
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-07-28. Missed the previous one? See issue #689.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: Aqurs1 (RfP scheduled to end after 31 July 2025 16:35 UTC)
New requests for permissions/Bot: THEbotIT 3 - New functional aspect to automatic creation of items describing the articles of Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (RE). We want to model now the articles, which amends the main articles, as those information where suppressed so far.
Wikidata's 13th birthday decentralized events will take place in October and November 2025. Feel free to browse the documentation pages to learn how to organize an event in your area, get funding, and get in touch with other organizers. Help translate the documentation pages into your language.
Wikimania starts next week August 6 through August 9. Check out the Wikidata related session in the program and start marking your preferred Wikimania sessions (⭐/like) on your mobile apps or calendars. If you are joining online to watch live stream and use the interactive features, please register on eventyay through wikimania.org. Note also the Wikidata meetups organised outside the official conference hours.
The modeling of agrégation ("the most competitive and prestigious examination for civil service in the French public education system" according to w:en:Agrégation) has been reviewed in various aspects: a summary is available in d:Talk:Q397610#Modeling agrégation. Suggestions are welcome.
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
organizational chart (image that displays the structure of this organization or government agency and the relationships and relative ranks of it's parts and positions/jobs)
Source Shrine (The shrine that the gods of this shinto shrine came from through Bunrei and Kanjo)
botanical photographs (a distinctive image of a flower, inflorescence, or a similar reproductive structure for this taxon)
WikiProject Highlights: WikiProject Sweden - A project to centralize, expand, and translate Sweden-related data on Wikidata while supporting the Swedish contributor community.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the week leading up to 2025-07-28. Missed the previous one? See issue #689.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: Aqurs1 (RfP scheduled to end after 31 July 2025 16:35 UTC)
New requests for permissions/Bot: THEbotIT 3 - New functional aspect to automatic creation of items describing the articles of Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (RE). We want to model now the articles, which amends the main articles, as those information where suppressed so far.
Wikidata's 13th birthday decentralized events will take place in October and November 2025. Feel free to browse the documentation pages to learn how to organize an event in your area, get funding, and get in touch with other organizers. Help translate the documentation pages into your language.
Wikimania starts next week August 6 through August 9. Check out the Wikidata related session in the program and start marking your preferred Wikimania sessions (⭐/like) on your mobile apps or calendars. If you are joining online to watch live stream and use the interactive features, please register on eventyay through wikimania.org. Note also the Wikidata meetups organised outside the official conference hours.
The modeling of agrégation ("the most competitive and prestigious examination for civil service in the French public education system" according to w:en:Agrégation) has been reviewed in various aspects: a summary is available in d:Talk:Q397610#Modeling agrégation. Suggestions are welcome.
New General datatypes property proposals to review:
organizational chart (image that displays the structure of this organization or government agency and the relationships and relative ranks of it's parts and positions/jobs)
Source Shrine (The shrine that the gods of this shinto shrine came from through Bunrei and Kanjo)
botanical photographs (a distinctive image of a flower, inflorescence, or a similar reproductive structure for this taxon)
WikiProject Highlights: WikiProject Sweden - A project to centralize, expand, and translate Sweden-related data on Wikidata while supporting the Swedish contributor community.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
The Community Tech team will be focusing on wishes related to Watchlists and Recent Changes pages, over the next few months. They are looking for feedback. Please read the latest update, and if you have ideas, please submit a wish on the topic.
Updates for editors
The Wikimedia Commons community has decided to block cross-wiki uploads to Wikimedia Commons, for all users without autoconfirmed rights on that wiki, starting on August 16. This is because of widespread problems related to files that are uploaded by newcomers. Users who are affected by this will get an error message with a link to the less restrictive UploadWizard on Commons. Please help translating the message or give feedback on the message text. Please also update your local help pages to explain this restriction. [100]
On wikis with temporary accounts enabled and Meta-Wiki, administrators may now set up a footer for the Special:Contributions pages of temporary accounts, similar to those which can be shown on IP and user-account pages. They may do it by creating the page named MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer-temp. [101]
Wikimania 2025 will run from August 6–9. The program is available for you to plan which sessions you want to attend. Most sessions will be live-streamed, with exceptions for those that show the "no camera" icon. If you are joining online to watch live-streams and use the interactive features, please register for a free virtual ticket. For example, you may be interested in technical sessions such as:
The MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference, Fall 2025 will be held 28–30 October 2025 in Hanover, Germany. This event is organized by and for the third-party MediaWiki community. You can propose sessions and register to attend.
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on July 11. Please help translate. The bulletin will be back after Wikimania with a special issue on the 19th August.
Get Ready for Wikimania 2025!
Upcoming and current events and conversations Let's Talk continues
Strengthening a neutral point of view: An overview of NPOV policies across Wikipedia projects, shows that 153 Wikipedias out of 342 (45%) don’t have easily accessible guidance on neutrality. The research was conducted to help understand how neutrality is ensured in our projects. and to provide an opportunity for peer learning across project communities. Read the full research and join the conversation.
Tech News: See all the 60 community-submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks in Tech News week 29 and 30. For example, the request to add Malayalam fonts in the Wikisource Book Export Tool was resolved and now, the rendering of Malayalam letters in exported Wikisource books are accurate.
Temporary Accounts: After the rollout of temporary accounts on 18 large and medium-sized Wikipedias, we are monitoring the impact of this change, and preparing for the next deployments. See the full project update.
Add a link: Administrators can now limit "Add a Link" to newcomers, as opposed to keeping it open to more experienced editors as well. "Add a link" helps newcomers to start editing, so restricting the feature to them enables Administrators to cater the feature to that specific group, which they can do via the Community Configuration feature.
Equity Fund: As it closes, the Equity Fund has announced its final round of grants to six past grantees. It will also be providing four "Connected Grants" to movement organizations who will pair closely with one of the grantees to collaborate together.
Don't blink: The latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
Content Translation: Translators who use the Suggestions feature in the Content Translation tool can now select and receive article suggestions that are customized to geographical locations of their interest using the new "Regions" filter.
Board selection: The Elections Committee shared a list of the all eligible candidates. As there are more than 10 eligible candidates, a shortlisting process is currently taking place. Representatives of Wikimedia movement affiliates that are currently compliant with their reporting obligations can participate in the shortlisting process. Learn more about this process and next steps on Meta.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
While Wikimania 2025 is underway in Nairobi, Kenya, you are invited to Wikimedia NYC's Satellite Social at Prime Produce on Thursday, August 7th, which will be an informal gathering of local Wikimedians and potentially feature editing, hacking, and board games. No experience of anything at all is required. All are welcome!
Additionally, a second Wiknic of the season, this time on Roosevelt Island, is planned for later in the month (August 24th). Stay tuned for further updates!
Hello everyone, and welcome to the 27th issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since 2025! Boy, does it feel good to kick off the year with an issue. Yep, it's been a year since we cleared out the 2022-2024 backlog with issues 23 and 24! Good times. Though in this case "a year" just means... 6 months? 😯 The salience of whatever joke I was planning to make here has vanished speedily. Aaron Liu (talk) 21:00, 31 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
WikiTextExpander by Polygnotus, is this edition's featured script. At the click of a configurable hotkey, this script will find and replace or link a configurable list of phrases within the selected text in all source editors (even in the comment/reply field!). Besides allowing the quick insertion of templated messages, this script greatly mitigates the WP:WTF? problem by providing both the legibility of familiar words and the convenience of shortcuts. And to those asking, the capitalization of "Wikitext" as "WikiText" was a necessary sacrifice for far-more-memorable acronymy.
CanonNi: AlertAssistant has been fixed and rewritten using OOUI instead of Twinkle's Morebits. Such modern, very tool. (Do note that the maintainer has since become inactive.)
NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh/AjaxLoader has been updated to use modern JS APIs that replace the browser's URL bar with the link you clicked on to load in place. The "back" (and "forward") buttons also work now. Cool, innit?
andrybak: Unsigned helper no longer shows an error when the message to sign was added in the earliest 50 revisions of a page's history. This is especially relevant to pages with short histories.
BilledMammal/Move+ needs updating to order list of pages handle lists of pages to move correctly regardless of the discussion's page, so that we may avoid repeating fiasco history.
In breaking m:Tech/News, Gadgets can now include .vue files. This makes it easier to develop modern user interfaces using Vue.js, in particular using Codex, the official design system of Wikimedia. Codex icons are now also available. The documentation has examples.
Appo/Globstory integrates OpenHistoryMap, updating the map whenever hovering/clicking on a location or year, the latter of which changes the map to be (hopefully) accurate to the year selected. It's pretty interesting.
linkinfo Somewhat similar to WP:NavPops, Awesome Aasim/linkinfo(pictured) provides a collection of links to replace the right-click context menu, presented beautifully.
PreviousDiscussions provides a link to search for your username on subpages of another user's userpage and talkpage conveniently.
Twineeea/noRedLinks brings you to the "read" instead of the "create" tab when you visit a red link. Contemplate life's mysteries as you stare into the blank! Deeply.
No, this is not going to be the enduring tradition of S++ for the future. This was meant to be a joke for the special occasion on the first day of the fourth month but was delayed by four months because I'm lazy.
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View all 35 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a bug with updating a user's edit-count after making a rollback edit, which is now fixed. [3]
Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. Starting the week of January 13, we will begin rerouting some page content endpoints from RESTbase to the newer MediaWiki REST API endpoints for all wiki projects. This change was previously available on testwiki and should not affect existing functionality, but active users of the impacted endpoints may raise issues directly to the MediaWiki Interfaces Team in Phabricator if they arise.
Edit patrollers now have a new feature available that can highlight potentially problematic new pages. When a page is created with the same title as a page which was previously deleted, a tag ('Recreated') will now be added, which users can filter for in Special:RecentChanges and Special:NewPages. [9]
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wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Hello, Wil540 art. This is a bot-delivered message letting you know that Draft:Rachel Stern, a page you created, has not been edited in at least 5 months. Drafts that have not been edited for six months may be deleted, so if you wish to retain the page, please edit it again or request that it be moved to your userspace.
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). There was a long-standing bug where an indication for new notifications was only shown if you had unseen Alerts. This bug is now fixed. In the future, Minerva users will notice a counter atop the bell icon when you have 1 or more unseen Notices and/or Alerts. [54]
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Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
Featured script
Updated scripts
Newly maintained scripts
Improve a script
Requested scripts
Miscellaneous
New scripts
